Lambda the Ultimate

Channel 9 has asked Erik Meijer to do a ground-up introduction to functional programming, because he and other MS programmers have spoken so much about its influence on the design of Visual Basic .NET and C#.

C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 1 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 2 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 3 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 4 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 5 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 6 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 7 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 8 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 9 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals, Chapter 10 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Graham Hutton - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 11 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 12 of 13
C9 Lectures: Dr. Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter 13 of 13

New videos will appear every Thursday, and Erik has hinted that he (or someone at Microsoft working for C9?) will be checking the video comments for feedback on what reviewers want to see more or less of. Such interactive aspect is sort of unique, since most "Computer Scientists create Discovery Channel"-style videos are filmed at huge conferences or user group meetings (i.e., Rich Hickey's Clojure TV and Simon Peyton Jones' talks). Probably the most widely watched lecture series on functional programming today is Abelson & Sussman's course on Scheme at MIT, which uses the wizard book (Erik says he is using Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell).

The webpage mentions Channel 9 has arranged with Cambridge University Press to give everyone 20% off either hardcover or paperback [which isn't necessarily the best deal you can find on the net]).

Not sure if this is sacrilege, but... anybody know of a "meta-Scheme" that would be a lowest-common-denominator/logical-intersection (in fact, not just in theory, so code just works) of Scheme among popular Schemes? I want to write meta-Scheme code and have it be valid (and ideally equivalent) in PLT, Gambit, Bigloo, etc. This would be for a kernel with SRFIs, and is explicitly ignoring / not using non-SRFI libraries that might come with the individual platforms.

Or is this just a dumb idea? Thanks :-)