The end of an era tomorrow. Every year, the kids' K-8 school has had every grade from 1st grade up run a 5K at the end of the year. I'm no runner, but so far as I can tell, I might be the only parent to have run/walked it every year for 10 years in a row. Youngest kid graduates out next week so that's it!
Clearly the best way to handle my last school 5K walk was to walk to the 5K walk. So, a nice send-off to the last 10 years by actually walking an 11K. ;-).
TFW you're looking at a bug report on your book, you're looking at the actual book seeing nothing wrong, and then the notification arrives. "Kindle edition." Aw. Hell.
I sometimes wonder if I should teach a project course (like raft or compilers) where you don't even know what programming language will be used until you show up. That would certainly be one way to make things even more exciting.
@leblancfg I can't say that I'll never offer an in-person course again, but if I do, it will probably be a one-off or at the very least, something that's offered very infrequently.
That said, I do miss the in-person interaction. Sigh. n/n
@deshipu It would probably be easier to hide the "mystery" language in the project that they're creating instead of the language that they're using for implementation. But the idea of a big "reveal" at the end could be fun.
Recovering from last week's compilers course, working on various improvements. I've been experimenting with the whole approach of writing a "nanopass" compiler (basically, having a lot of very small compiler phases).
I'm struck by how much this approach really leans into issues of the type-system, but with respect to the implementation of the compiler itself. Wasn't fully anticipating the scale of it, but it's great.
@dabeaz That's surprising. I assumed it would be easier to write a nano-passed compiler in a language without a type system since it needs to lower the program representation incrementally, and literature in that area often uses a Lisp dialect. Though I have never written such a compiler myself, so my assumption could be completely wrong
@lesley It was interesting. We were coding in Python where there is all of this flexibility and you can do all this incremental evolution of things. But, at the same time you feel pulled to put more structure on it. A type system can do that. Although it's unclear if the type system as presented by "optional typing" is that type system.
Trying to convince the kid to do summer community band with me. Aside from the big hurdle of "playing with a bunch of olds", I contend that community band is the way to get good.
We'll probably play 20+ songs. Real arrangements. Stuff they'd play in the top HS band. You'd probably only get 1-2 rehearsals per song--tons of sight reading. People are there to play and have fun. So, it's totally chill, not competitive. Get to be out in the community. And it's free. Unlike band camp.
So, I managed to get the kid to go to community band rehearsal last night. Afterwards, looking exhausted, he says "we rarely make it through a single song during rehearsal at school." Last night: 11 songs. Playing concert Monday.
Better buckle your seat-belt my friend because I looked at the calendar and we're playing 30 different songs in 5 concerts over the next two months.
Pro tip for kids who want a workout: Community band, not pricey band camp.
@fabian I must admit that I entertain certain thoughts though. For example, if my kid included a minor grammatical mistake in his college admission essay, would someone seeing it interpret it as "he doesn't know how to write" or would it now be interpreted as "he probably wrote this essay himself"? I don't know.
Note to self: "I'm sorry" is not the most tactful response when other parents say they're working on a project related to AI-- correct though it may be.