I’ve learned a lot of languages over the years. Before the Internet that meant buying a book and working through it, often without even being able to run programs in the language. That’s how I learned C, from the original version of Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language, long before I had access to an actual implementation, which in those days basically meant a computer running Unix.

When I got interested in Scheme, I bought PC-Scheme a version of the language for IBM PC’s written (for some reason) by Texas Instruments. I ran this on my father’s IBM PC-XT, and worked through the entirety of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs using it. (In between sessions of the original SimCity.)

Fast forward nearly thirty years, and I recently read the article “Why I Am Learning Rust Now”, which made a pretty good case for Rust as a modern systems programming language. It strives to be efficient, like C, yet incorporate modern features for type safety, concurrency support, functional programming, etc. In exploring Rust, I found that learning programming languages seems to have become a rather tedious process for me. Why isn’t it as challenging and fun as it was when I learned Scheme?

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I haven’t had time to write anything this week, despite having two half-started entries to work from. I promised myself I wouldn’t let a week go by without writing something, but here I am. So I thought I’d throw together something about how I found a nice looking blog, and what that has me thinking about my own blog.

I was going to apologize for this being a short, “I have to write something” post, but it isn’t turning out to be that short. That’s because the journey to the blog I liked so much is a bit of a story in itself. It starts with a new programming language, moves on to touch on emoji support in Emacs, and only then ends up at the blog that caught my eye.

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I thought I would take a crack at deriving the quadratic formula as discussed in last week’s post, Thinking Like a Mathematician. I wanted to discuss last week’s post with my fourteen-year-old daughter. If I could walk her through the steps to derive the quadratic formula like my tutor did all those years ago, would she agree that math was more interesting and easier to remember if you derived things out like a mathematician, rather than memorizing facts?

Well, I’d better make sure I still can derive the quadratic formula, before I do that, so I’m going to work through that here. Consider these notes for a conversation with Flynn later this weekend.

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I ran across an interesting post on Medium written by Junaid Mubeen called The time I ‘nearly’ solved the Twin Prime Conjecture. The story is about how, in the summer before starting at Oxford, Junaid thought he had solved the Twin Primes Conjecture, even though he didn’t really come particularly close.

The point, however, wasn’t really his failure to solve the problem. It was on the difference between thinking like a mathematician – what he was doing when he tried to solve this conjecture – and what students are taught in math class before going to college (as we call it here in the states).

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This is just a quick plug for HackerRank. My boss (well one of my bosses) sent me the link because he wanted me to take a look at it as a way of helping to screen applicants for programming jobs. I quickly went from, “Hey, this is kind of cool.” to, “Meh, the problems don’t seem quite right for screening”.

Then I had two weeks off over the holidays. I wound up spending some time each morning solving puzzles, and my opinion changed. I was hooked.

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I’ve wanted to make a blog on and off, to collect random notes on topics such as programming and math. It wasn’t so much that I wanted the world to hear what I had to say, as a place to put the random notes that I would otherwise have saved in various files scattered in my Documents folder. For my first post, I thought I’d put together some notes on how I wound up choosing the technology for this blog.

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Welcome to Hexo! This is your very first post. Check documentation for more info. If you get any problems when using Hexo, you can find the answer in troubleshooting or you can ask me on GitHub.

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