A start

Right, first post, hmm...

I guess I'll start with what I've been up to at Uni...

On the last leg of my Comp Sci course, I'm finding it increasingly difficult not to check out of things.

I just want the damned thing to be over, and to go and do my Industrial Placement with ARM (which I may or may not get).

As of now, I've got a _sane_ database of laptop specs to pull out of my arse for my group statistics/AI project (essentially a product comparison engine). It's gonna be a long haul of ruby, sed, bash, regexes, and little manual fixups. Really, not fun stuff...

Now onto the fun stuff...

I like progamming languages. I LOVE progamming languages, I know a fair few. The newest members of my army, being scala, haskell and ruby.

Scala blew me away when I first met it. It had so many features.

Seemed like it had all the best language features, created to this date.

Then, I hated it. I hated it for it's seemingly nonsensical type-inference mechanism, which surely did little more than to make code unreadable.

A few days went by, A few days writing 1600 lines of Java for my Games AI project, and lo-and-behold, I didn't feel so bad about it.

I concluded that, aside from a few choice features (pattern matching, traits), it should be thought of as no more, and no less than Java, but with less of the verbose crap.

I still wasn't satisfied, I wanted something different. MORE different.

I attempted to write my own stack-based 'functional assembler', if you will, which actually turned out pretty nifty.

A lovechild of Lisp(as I understood it then) & FORTH, I hope to implement it on an FPGA someday when I have money.

Speaking of Lisp; yesterday, I finally managed to wrap my head around Common Lisp!

Or at least it's syntax and actual operation.

I feel somehow liberated, even though I don't know enough about the libraries, or have had enough practice, to do anything really useful with it.

I may just be doing my next Games AI project in Clojure in an attempt to get to grips with the Lisp way of thinking.

Industrial Placement...

Last week, I finally applied for the year's placement/internship at ARM, in Cambridge, that I've had my eye on for over a year now. I've yet to hear back from them, but i've got a vote of confidence from my cousin, Ben, who did this placement a few years ago.
After I complete that, I'll have - aside from experience working for one hell of a name - a designated BSc Hons in Computer Science; Hopefully enough to kick-start my career into a...direction of some kind.

That's about all for now, I believe.

I'm now off to depress myself with HTML.

Till next time :)

Lee