TITLE: Much Code To Study, Learning with Students
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 24, 2011  8:04 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I mentioned
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-09.html#e2011-09-23T15_52_45.htm">
   last time</A>
that I've been spending some time with Norvig's work on Strachey's
checkers program in CPL.  This is fun stuff that can be used in my
programming languages course.  But it isn't the only new stuff I've
been learning.  When you work with students on research projects
and independent studies, opportunities to learn await at every turn.

A grad student is taking the undergrad programming languages course
and so has to do some extra projects to earn his grad credit.  He
is a lover of Ruby and has been looking at a couple of Scheme
interpreters implemented in Ruby,
<A HREF="https://github.com/jcoglan/heist">
   Heist</A>
and
<A HREF="https://github.com/technomancy/bus-scheme">
   Bus-Scheme</A>.
I'm not sure where this will lead yet, but that is part of the
exercise.
 
The undergrad who
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-09.html#e2011-09-08T20_19_25.htm">
   faced the "refactor or rewrite?" decision</A>
a few weeks ago teaches me something new every week, not only through
his experiences writing a language processor but also about his
program's source and target languages, Photoshop and HTML/CSS.

Another grad student is working on a web application and teaching
me other things about Javascript.  Now we are expanding into one
tool I've long wanted to study in greater detail,
<A HREF="http://processingjs.org/">
   Processing.js</A>
and perhaps into another I only just learned of from
<A HREF="http://vocamus.net/dave/">
   Dave Humphrey</A>,
a beautiful little data presentation library called
<A HREF="http://mbostock.github.com/d3/">
   D3</A>.

And as if that weren't enough, someone tweets that
<A HREF="http://avdi.org/devblog/">
   Avdi Grimm</A>
is sharing is code and notes as he
<A HREF="https://github.com/avdi/sbpprb">
   implements <EM>Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns</EM> in Ruby</A>.
Awesome.  This Avdi guy is rapidly becoming one of my heroes.

All of these projects are good news.  One of the great advantages
of working at a university is working with students and learning
along with him.  Right now, I have a lot on my plate.  It's
daunting but fun.
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