Since this marks the conclusion of my fifth week in Recurse, next week is halfway...wow does time fly!
Last week I was able to accomplish my typical tasks of reading a chapter of the compiler book, going through CIS 194, and working on side projects. I also attended the ML presentation given this week which covered neural networks. I think I will continue to attend these even though I have very limited knowledge in the machine learning area. Learning about new things is always interesting and a nice break from typical work.
The chapter the compiler group and I covered was the most intriguing chapter yet. We covered procedure abstraction which dove deep into namespaces, procedure communication, and linkage. Learning about how different programming paradigms handle constructing environments for procedures to operate in gave me a viewpoint I never acknowledged before. The way I interpreted it, is object-oriented languages such as python with open class structures can have performance issues if a program modifies the class fields & methods during runtime. I want to learn more about this so I think I will set up a research & hack session this week to dive into this (maybe write a blog post about my findings too!)
Last week for CIS 194, we learned about the IO Monad and functors. Functors are interesting, I am not entirely certain what they are yet, I just know that any type that implements
fmap is defined as a functor.
This week I'll be continuing my typical schedule of work as well as setting up that research & hack session.
Here's a funny xkcd I came across this weekend.
Until next time ~ Dan