Mon
Grace OOO
Tues
ya girl is BACK and better than ever :) impossible stuff day! set out with a loose goal of building a programming language, found myself really interested in existing esolangs, and finally started implementing a Piet interpreter in Rust
- read up on how to build programming languages (lexing/tokenizing, parsing, action trees)
- deep dive into esolangs (my favorites so far: Piet, Befunge, Whitespace, Chicken, Aheui (아희))
- also stumbled upon sí which is a C++ pseudo-programming language that serves as a Spanish-based alternative to C++. gEt iT? “sí” and “C”?? i’m dead
my other ideas for an esolang:
- compiles to do the opposite of what you expect. reverses all of the logic
- non-deterministic (not only random, but code execution differs depending on the time of day?)
- spatial computing (I guess this is the same idea as 2D languages like Befunge)
- óxido: Rust in Spanish
- grace: the only valid characters are on lefthand side of the keyboard, so you can code with just one hand. i’m left-handed and my name happens to be exclusively left-hand typed (on qwerty at least)!
woohoo today was fun :D
Weds
- the missing semester: (vim vim vim!!)
- pairing on Piet in Rust with @Jordan
- rl z2h with @Camille @Michael
I’m at a point where I have a lot of projects I wanna do (Piet in Rust, draggable obsidian blocks plugin, search engine combiner/toggler, set game solver) in parallel with the reading groups (arena, rl z2h, missing semester) and this is super exciting. I probably won’t get to everything but I’m happy with whatever I do get to :D
Thurs
- Only me and Michael at Notetaking…!
- Recruiting check-in with Laura
- Missing Semester: data wrangling!
- “Finished” 01_MDPs notebook for rl z2h
- Pairing with Jordan on Piet
- Brainstorming my own Piet command set — I want the commands to be more interpretable visually
Fri
- paired with @Jordan on using Rust to build a Piet interpreter!!! In a world dominated by Big Programming Languages (lol), Piet’s “esoteric-ness” feels like a radical act of resistance. I don’t know if there’s anything inherently silly/impractical about a language defined by changes in color as opposed to letters+characters – what if there’s a parallel universe out there where people are using Piet to build an “esoteric” language called Rust? In that world, colors would be serious business while letters+characters are silly decorations.
- paired with @Justin on missing semester data wrangling (completed most of it!)
- got halfway through 02_RL!!!
- my book The Glitch got a shoutout from @Samantha in RC’s The Optimist zine (led by @Nicole)!!!! thank you both!!!
this week FLEW BY. A few personal notes:
- There are many people who know much more than I do about programming (just a fact, given that I am a wee young unexceptional non-CS-major new grad). Even so, it’s not uncommon to stumble upon something they don’t know that I can help them with. My knowledge is not simply a subset of theirs and I have much more to offer than I’d thought!
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Programming feels so serious and I’ve ascribed so much importance to it in my mind, like it’s a calling and only for the chosen ones and something that only smart people can do well and are interested in (I think this my internalization of the societal glorification of male-coded work and the way that men do that work, see links below) – and I’m afraid to find any way that “I can’t do it” (it doesn’t come as easily to me and I struggle more than others) because that’ll be proof that I’m fundamentally stupid and will always be an outsider; there’s a high barrier to entry without a community, and being part of the RC community has really helped me feel less insecure! Regarding my value as a person, what do I care if someone is better at programming than I am? It’s like if someone is better than me at weightlifting, cooking, crocheting, language-learning – cool, great, neat; we’re all on our own journeys. Programming is literally just another hobby or just another profession. When it comes to any programming thing, I could learn it if I wanted to (just like any other thing) – and if I don’t want to (i.e. if I’m not interested in it), then that’s just fine because what I do know and what I am interested in is cool.
- the Geek Mythology chapter, “The model of a successful computer science student is viewed through a male prism”
- As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops, “the proportion of females in an occupation affects pay, owing to devaluation of work done by women”, and the converse: the glass escalator: men being fast tracked in female-dominated careers
- and this doesn’t even account for non-binary folks! and intersectionality w.r.t. race, class, ability, etc.!
outstanding tasks for next week:
- finish 02_RL
- finish Missing exercises (vim, data wrangling)
- implement floodfill for Piet