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.

Sedgewick Algorithms Course

Working through the first twenty or so lessons from Zed Shaw's Learn C the Hard Way has been interesting but slow going -- a completely open-ended autodidactic mode is pretty difficult to maintain.

To review some algorithms, I've joined Sedgewick's recurring Algorithms Part 1 on Coursera. I gather that this class is more focused on implementation details and the specifics of programming in Java than Tim Roughgarden's excellent algorithms classes on Coursera, which uses CLRS and tends to focus more on reasoning about correctness and complexity. The contrast should be quite interesting. I haven't written in Java since working with Processing, so this should serve as a good language refresher as well.