Mauritius Blog Tracker

Last friday, second year students following my Programming Languages class had a test on Scheme and Prolog. I asked them eight relatively straightforward questions which they had to complete in 45 minutes. I hope that most of them managed to get most of the answers right (I could see some students struggling though…) As I [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Answers for my Scheme and Prolog test”, url: “http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2008/04/07/answers-for-my-scheme-and-prolog-test/” });

Paul Graham, one of my heroes, has written Six Principles for Making New Things where he offers the following (timeless) advice when creating something new:

I like to find simple solutions
to overlooked problems
that actually need to be solved
and deliver them as informally as possible
starting with a very crude version 1
then iterating rapidly.

I wonder if this recipe [...]

SHARETHIS.addEntry(
{
title: “Are we worthy Mauritians?”,
url: “http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2008/03/10/are-we-worthy-mauritians/”
}

);

Christina and myself have embarked on a consultancy project which will last for about 6 weeks. We urgently need a project assistant to assist us in doing some surveys in some schools and colleges and to analyze the results obtained.
That person should preferably be a proactive and autonomous student of the University (we don’t really [...]

SHARETHIS.addEntry(
{
title: “Urgently looking for a project assistant”,
url: “http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2008/03/04/urgently-looking-for-a-project-assistant/”
}

);

As you all know by now, I am currently teaching the Scheme programming language to my 2nd year students as a means to master the functional programming paradigm.

I started four weeks ago with a general introduction on programming paradigms and on the necessity to at least know the most important ones in order to become [...]

SHARETHIS.addEntry(
{
title: “Learning Scheme with me”,
url: “http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2008/02/25/learning-scheme-with-me/”
}

);

In his beautiful essay, The Art of Lisp & Writing, Richard Gabriel makes a strong case for the use of programming mediums instead of programming languages when either introducing programming to students or starting a new project.
He says:
“The difference between Lisp and Java, as Paul Graham has pointed out, is that Lisp is for working [...]

SHARETHIS.addEntry(
{
title: “Learning by experimenting (with Scheme)”,
url: “http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2008/01/31/learning-by-experimenting-with-scheme/”
}

);

I’ve just started teaching a new module today to second year Computer Science students. It’s the Programming Languages module where students are supposed to be exposed to alternative paradigms and programming languages.
Today I had a lab session with one of the group of students and, as lecture hasn’t started yet, I asked them to write [...]

SHARETHIS.addEntry(
{
title: “Creativity in Programming”,
url: “http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2008/01/21/creativity-in-programming/”
}

);

I came across a great blog entry “Books that should exist” by Daniel Ehrenberg, a well-known Factor hacker, today where he writes:
I, like many of you reading this blog, have an unhealthy interest in programming languages. Mine may be a little more unhealthy than yours. Whenever I hear the name of a programming language that [...]

SHARETHIS.addEntry(
{
title: “The Story of Programming: great idea!”,
url: “http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2008/01/15/the-story-of-programming-great-idea/”
}

);

I’ve just discovered Factor, a new programming language. It is a stack-based language like Forth and Postscript. Factor works on many different platforms.
I’m currently looking at it as one of the possible programming languages I’ll cover in my Programming Languages module at the University of Mauritius. Simple stack-based languages are interesting because they are low-level [...]

SHARETHIS.addEntry(
{
title: “Factor, a practical stack language”,
url: “http://www.noulakaz.net/weblog/2008/01/15/factor-a-practical-stack-language/”
}

);

I came across an interesting article called Should Java be banned from schools?.
The most interesting part were the comments. One of them rang a bell:
Also, no CS study is complete without some messing with machine level instructions, compilers & interpreters, algorithms, etc. Forget about learning a language: a good CS student must be able to [...]