Quick summary

commit 6b97efdecc49f3b728f80ed7ebb2d3e92c47fbe0
Author: zenAndroid <21260658+zenAndroid@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Fri Apr 3 21:06:15 2020 -0400

    Some further pushes

commit b07a561215378c097daccc804eafec37724f2188
Author: zenAndroid <21260658+zenAndroid@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Wed Apr 1 12:07:15 2020 -0400

    initial commit

As you can see from my git log, I started my Haskell trek on the first of April, just as promised ¹.

The Haskell book is interesting, also a bit long, which is good as far as I’m concerned, cause that means it goes into great detail, (better than LYAH in that regard), but sometimes it feels a bit blo-

Though I guess this isn’t a review post, so I won’t go into that.

Anyways, my progress was somewhat steady through the basics, actually the first parts of the book were kind of easy because it mostly talked about general concepts of functional programming, which I was a bit comfortable with, it got a bit more interesting as it got to datatypes and such, so that was nice, then the thing with kinds, which I didn’t get the point of until the book started explaining the Functor, Applicative, Monad and so on.

The copy of the book I had was the 2016 one I think so the usage of cabal and the entire chapter on testing and making projects on Haskell was extremely tedious but still a bit instructional i guess.

I think I have a lot more to say, but for now, I’ll just say that I stopped at Traversable, although I did read a bit of Reader and yet didn’t do the Chapter exercises. (for Reader)

Well, now I am faced with a couple of options:

• Math.
• Skip the last part of the fourth SICP chapter, ans start working on the fifth.
• Try getting into creative writing.

And I am thinking that way forward is probably going to be a mix of them.

Also, I want to say that in middle-march/beginning April I wasn’t as efficient as I would have hoped, but there were … Extenuating circumstances shall we say.

Math

God I miss that enthralling feeling when you struggle with a mathematical exercise for a while before finally finding the solution to the problem and I think it is high time I go back to flexing that mathematical muscle/rebuilding those neural pathways again.

The plan I think is probably going to be mostly using some textbooks I adored from my high school days to get back to that level at least, these textbooks include some very interesting, integrative exercises that I always found illuminating, so hopefully they help out.

Of course, the first thing I’m going to be focusing on is Calculus, god I loved that subject, even though I’m actually kind of intimidated somewhat, but I believe that I’ll get over it refreshing my mind.

I will try to refresh my mind on as much topics I can, but the ones that come to mind immediately have to be complex numbers, calculus, linear algebra.

For some reason, probability theory isn’t on my immediate to do list ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, even though I imagine I’ll use it a lot if I want to learn about quantum mechanics/quantum computing, which I want, by the way.

Computing with Register machines

The later parts of the fourth chapter of SICP still elude me I think, … The double continuation of the non-deterministic evaluator is still somewhat confusing and while I did trace a (kind of) execution I still don’t think I intuitively grasp it, as for the logic programming section, I completely burned out at that time and just blanked on the material, maybe now if I go back to it I might understand some more, but I can’t hide the fact that I’m extremely excited to work through the fifth chapter.

Now that I am thinking about it. Let me see if I can find a summary of what is in store.

From Stack Overflow:

Chapter 5 makes a rough model of ‘register machines’, to represent your current day computer at an abstract level. They construct a little register machine language that acts as an assembly-language for all intents and purpose. They introduce all the datastructures and control flow constructs needed to do the next bit: building a scheme interpreter in this machine language. Somehow still similar to the meta-circular interpreter. Afterwards they jump off the deep end and construct a scheme compiler in their register machine language; complete with assembly step, tail-recursion optimization, garbage-collection, lexical addressing, tracing, etc.

OK WELL I AM DEFINITELY INTERESTED

Creative writing

This is a bit of a stretch maybe, but I want to get into creative writing, I do have some stories in mind, and I will be trying to outline and see if I can write some.