A Free Education: October 2020

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Network Programming

We decided to a bit of socket-level network programming as part of the systems programming study group at Recurse Center. The canonical text would appear to be the Unix Network Programming book, but Beej's guide also came highly recommended -- with the added benefit of being quicker to get started and freely available online:

It turns out that following the correct order of syscalls per Beej's incantations is relatively straightforward... yielding very simple toy servers in short order:

https://github.com/tkuriyama/toyserver

On the other hand, some fundamentals of C programming still elude me, e.g. I couldn't work out how to refactor the creation of sockets into a standalone function due to some (presumably basic) pointer issues...

Monday, October 19, 2020

fp-course

Following the Learn Haskell recommendation, the FP study group at Recurse Center worked through the fp-course exercises after finishing CIS 194.

https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell

The exercises seem to provide good practice, with modules like State and StateT requiring some mental gymnastics training..!

The repo unfortunately has some incomplete tests files, so I transcribed a few from the comments into HSpec format for Parser.hs and MoreParser.hs: https://github.com/tkuriyama/puzzles/tree/master/fp-course.

The test cases were tedious but turned out to be worthwhile, since JsonParser.hs is comprised of more abstract parser combinators. (Interestingly, the parser combinator in CIS 194 is almost identical to fp-course in its building blocks... a coincidence, or a common design pattern?).

Anagrams and Cheque remain to be completed, but we're moving on to writing a toy database in Haskell (with the goal to complete in the last two weeks of the Fall 1 batch!).