Irregularly Scheduled Programming

Another day, another short riddle to be solved with several programming languages! This one is nice because solving it doesn’t need a lot of code, but it uses some interesting aspects of evaluation.

I saw a toot celebrating a short, clean implementation of a square root finding algorithm and wanted to dig a bit deeper into how it works, with a diversion into some APL.

With a serious yak shaving deviation, I have a really short “cheat” solution to one of the featured Exercism problems. It’s been a really insightful journey getting to this point, and as always I’ve learned a lot along the way. The fact that I was able to understand the required changes and propose them is thanks to the open-source nature of programming languages.

I’ve tried to get this same image transformation working at least three times now, but I can finally celebrate that it’s working! I’ve been (re-)learning Julia and I still love the language, so it was time to take my learning to the next level and actually build a package.

Hyperlinks are great - they add value to a block of text by adding additional links out to more things to read - but they’re a distraction if you’re trying to read an in-depth piece of text and comprehend it linearly. Let’s hack the web!

I’m solving Advent of Code this year using a relaxed criteria compared to last year in that I’m allowing myself to use packages where they’re helpful, rather than strictly base R. Last year I re-solved half of the exercises using Rust which helped me learn a lot about Rust. This year I’m enamored with APL, and I wanted to share a particularly beautiful solution.

In the lead up to Christmas each year, Advent of Code offers a series of 25 puzzles which start out reasonably simple, but get progressively harder, eventually requiring knowledge of algorithms and dynamic programming techniques. Last year I solved these in (strictly) base R on the day they were released (or as close to as I could). I then (starting Dec 27) went back and re-solved (13 of) them in Rust.

This post details what I learned along the way and some fun visualisations I made.

Print debugging has its place. Sure, it’s not always the best way to debug something, but it can often be the fastest. In this post I describe a useful way to do this in Rust and how we can get similar behaviour in R.

If you’re reading this hoping that I’m done with droning on about array-languages, close the tab… it only gets worse from here. If you thought APL was unreadable, even after my earlier blog posts, again - close button is right there. In this post I try out a brand new stack-based array language and continue to advocate for learning such things.

I’m part of a local Functional Programming Meetup group which hosts talks, but also coordinates social meetings where we discuss all sorts of FP-related topics including Haskell and other languages. We’ve started running challenges where we all solve a given problem in a language of our choosing then discuss over drinks how they compare.