GSoC Day 51

It’s Tuesday

• But I’ll do a re-cap of yesterday, too.
• It was Bobby Findler’s birthday! I happened to be doing Racket and saw this in my IDE (Dr. Racket) on Monday!

• Ah! How cool!

Anyways..Pair-Programming with Chris

• Worked through all the tutorials for next week, and left work a bit early (3pm instead of 3:30pm) and took an hour nap to pair-programme with Chris.
• I really think it’s an excellent idea that they had, because Haskell has been challenging, and I’m also not a T-programmer yet. I believe Gabe had told me a year ago that I had a good breadth of languages, but I’m missing the depth (hence, “T”). So my problem-solving skills for tougher problems need work and I really struggle. So I’d have to say that Haskell is my first real language where I’ve really struggled. I mean, I’ve done C++, for about a year and a half, but it’s school, so I don’t count that, and I really only ever did one technical C++ and C interview.
• Hey, if I eventually get good enough at Haskell, I’ll do all my interviews in it! :D

Then Gabe jumped in

• During our regular meeting time, and helped me work through a problem by sharing his screen. It was really interesting to hear his story that he struggled with the Maybe Monad, and one day, he was so frustrated with a problem while he was learning that he just dropped a bunch of Justs and Maybes everywhere. That was really funny but he seems too sensible to be like that from what I know of him now.

There is this funny repo floating around

• It really made me laugh. It’s a Haskell-trolling repo. The funny part is that even though it’s a troll, both sides seem to take it for what it is. It’s good that people have a good sense of humour about it.

Oh, so work

• Yeah, the slider drags!

• So it doesn’t click around, but it does indeed drag!

• The next thing I need to work on is making it so that it draws during different states; when the mouse is pressed, when it is released, and when it is dragged are all different states that affect the slider. Then I need to make a snap to function. So that’s in the works.

I also

• Want to spend some time just doing more Type Kwon Do type exercises. I was telling Gabe I really struggle with some of them (the easy ones are okay, but more complex I need practice on), and he said it’s a good skill to improve on because it transfers to everything, because it’s “equational reasoning”. And that Haskell is good in that a lot of the other “stuff” is stripped out and you can just reason your types and make sure what you are passing on one side is equal to the other side, etc. So yeah, I want to get better at that. I actually went over some parts of Haskellbook today that I had gone through before and I’m starting to breeze through them. It’s really weird. And I had struggled through some parts before.
• I can still improve on Lambda Calculus, though. But one of the things I’d like to just get better at is types and being able to (on paper) know if something will compile, without relying on the type-checker.

So yeah…

• I think that’s about it. I’ll be doing Haskell tomorrow! :D