Carl's Blog

For the second term of the 2011/2012 academic year I’ve made a small challenge for members of CSLU.

Details are found on the PDF.

Good luck.

P.S a bit of background reading can be found here.

PDF: CSLU Lent Challenge

So I ran a talk on learning programming languages last week. It was the second time I had done that particular talk, and in this case the hardware setup went smoothly – as it was done by Stephen Wattam the CSLU VP.

We had a pretty good turn out, mostly of year year undergraduate students who so far had only played with a little C. I took pictures of everyone hard at work doing their task … well, ok. They were mostly on tryruby.org which was even better.

It showed that they had an interest in a new language which is fairly good at prototyping and will allow them to try out their ideas fast. I may have semi pushed them on to it in my talk, so I’m glad they were listening. No one tried learning Haskell though, but then I’ll drop in on everyone next term and see how they are doing. The slides and some info for my talk can be found  at the CSLU site.

On a side note … My Instagram tshirt came! I’m not sure if I’ll ever wear it outside as it’s a bit long, but still!

Well, this is getting rather fun, but quite time consuming.

My alarm clock is ticking away and my sleep time dwindling as I type, but I just don;t feel the urge to sleep yet. I’ve got a talk/demo I’m preparing for Wednesday for CSLU and it is getting bigger and bigger workload wise.

I’m hoping this translates to geeky hacky fun though.

The talk is on languages and paradigms, so I’m introducing a load of languages (8 I think, off the top of my head), describing the basic constructs, and then getting the room to build a “99 bottles” program using 3 of the given languages.

The fun, but time consuming, part of this is that I’m building cheat sheets for each language. Done the first one tonight, and it was for C, so quite detailed. Hoping I can cut/paste a lot of stuff for similar languages, and hoping I don’t have to fall back to a stock one. It is nice to make a custom one for the group, and also cements my own knowledge, especially of the languages I am unfamiliar with.

After the 99 bottles task, I am going to set some slightly longer challenges which can be made easier using certain paradigms. I have an OO one, which can be done procedurally. It’s based around a game scenario. For procedural I will probably do a processing batch type thing. For functional I need to do a little more research.

With the department allowing me to set up a load of VMs for everyone to use too, this should be pretty fun on Wednesday … so long as I get it all finished in time!