Thursday September 14th

Cassini Finale and C

  • As Cassini winds down, there was quite a lot of information and activity from JPL.
  • I would be honoured to intern there next year!
  • Oh, I’m racing on a boat on the 24th, one day after my LinkedIn event :)
  • Also was recruited by two solid companies; I have a coding challenge to do on Sunday, for submittal by Tuesday. I don’t think I’m ready, but why not just try in any case. It’s a learning experience!

Learning C

  • My professor is not a fan of C because she loves OOP. So naturally, I started learning some C. So far, it’s very fun! I’m enjoying taking little programmes from C++ and making them into C programmes.

  • Compiling is as easy as gcc -o filename filename.c and then filename

  • Also did a bit of using make file by using make filename and ./filename in the CS50 Cloud9 IDE. This was a method used for CS50. I just started a little bit of CS50 via EdX, but it’s kind of slow for me, and I’m losing my mind. So…we’ll see. Maybe I’ll just review pointers and structs and stuff and objects and oh wait…it doesn’t have objects :P. Chris mentioned GObject. The people on FP Chat are amazeballs. One person casually mentioned another had made a garbage collector. Wut. It seems you can’t throw a rock in that community without hitting someone who has made a language, or at least certainly a compiler. They inspire me.

  • Back to CS50…There is still stuff I can get out of it.

  • I got bored…so I made a text-based cli goblin game :)

Lose

Win

Also did change programme

  • They give you an option to complete a few programming assignments. I did all of them.

  • This one returns the smallest number of coins to be used, given a dollars and cents input.

This is a mario game, where you put in the height and get a series of steps

  • The Mario one was actually a bit tricker, because it involved my using three for-loops. I solved it in Python, first, like this:
def pyramid(n):
  for i in range(1, n+1):
    print (" " * ((n+1) - i)) + "#" * (i+1)
  return 

#pyramid(5)
pyramid(3)
  • But I totally could not do what I did in Python in C, so… :(

Anyways…

  • The FP community (via FP Chat) was also incredibly helpful in pointing out resources and things of which I should take note. I think it’s a good thing that I’m learning some C.

Things to think about

  • I watched an interesting stream by Chris, where we went through a review of a book in C, and also spoke about things that were important about the language/ things to anticipate. Here are some of the notes I took of things to look out for/ be aware of :

    • sequence points
    • ffi (Foreign Function Interface)
    • managing memory
    • server processing
    • persistent services
    • C is supposed to hurt; idioms are layered on top of the language, which increases complexity
    • pointers
    • undefined behavior (eg things that should make sense but give errors)

Katas

  • Acrostic (eg. June Is Paying == JIP)
def read_out(acrostic):
    arr = []
    for i in acrostic:
        arr.append(i[0])
    return ''.join(arr)

Things to do

  • Continue learning C
  • Review Objects, Structs, Pointers
  • Work through Nanodegree and final project
Written on September 14, 2017