February Update

I've been fairly busy with work so I haven't been able to follow the schedule for the Sedgewick Algorithms Part 1 as much as I'd like. I've been surprised by how much I've enjoyed it so far -- this week's assignment involves implementing a deque, which I've always taken for granted in Python (in collections.deque). I initially tried with a dynamically resizing array, but the assignment's requirement for constant-time deque operations looks like a job for doubly linked lists.

Something that I read about in Niemeyer and Knudsen's Learning Java before--but didn't understand at the time--is the significance of generics for parametric polymorphism. I assume this is something that one would learn in an introductory programming language theory class, but in my case I've had to arrive at it by being forced to think a great deal about types in learning Haskell.

(Speaking of types -- I attended the Compose Conference in NYC recently and was quite struck by Don Syme's talk on F#. Another language to add to the learning list...)

In other news, while working on a data visualization project (with the new p5.js, which originates from processing.js), I struggled for a day or two with JavaScript before arriving at prototypes and bind()... something that I'll need to revisit more fundamentally in the near future.