Syllabus next steps: June edition

[colinleach]

It's a relief to get through this particularly challenging corner of the syllabus:

I think the ones I'll look at next, in no particular order, are:

• Dates & Times
• Regular Expressions
• Iterators
• Dict functions (see comments in WIP draft of pairs-and-dicts concept #812)
• Higher-Order Functions

There is another difficult group, which I'm not ready to tackle yet:

• N-Dimensional Arrays
• Dataframes (not available in test runner!)
• Comprehensions (the full version)
• Linear Algebra (in a tastefully restrained way, unless my impulses get the better of me!)

Longer-term, we need somewhere to fit in Macros (aargh!) and Modules.

Also, we still need an exercise to pair with the merged Rational Numbers concept.

These are some entries in #902, originally drafted by Erik long ago:

• symbols
• interfaces
• modules
• recursion
• tasks
• channels
• macros (this should probably be split up into multiple concepts)

We've sort of talked a bit about symbols, I'm not sure how we'd expand this into a separate concept.

Recursion isn't especially popular in the Julia community, as far as I can tell.

I'd have to do a lot more reading before I can saying anything sensible about interfaces, tasks and channels. Getting into parallel programming, I guess: another big challenge.

[depial]

I'll try to think up an exercise for Rational Numbers in the next couple days.

Let me know if I can be of any help on anything else. I just have to say that I actually quite like recursion! Although, what I like has little bearing on what others do ;)

[colinleach]

I'm pretty neutral on recursion in Julia, just quoting something I'd seen online. I guess we could do a short concept, along the lines of "this is an option, it's sometimes useful, please don't go crazy with it". I'm assuming there's no tail recursion, so depth is an issue, but I need to confirm that.

[depial]

I'm pretty neutral on recursion in Julia

No worries, I'm just thinking in a more general context (I would love to do an algorithms series of exercises).

I don't think I know enough about the subtleties of recursion in Julia to make a statement about it. I've only seen there's no tail recursion optimization, so there's probably no reason to talk about it from a syllabus standpoint.

[colinleach]

I think it's a "maybe, someday". We have more urgent challenges!

[depial]

I've been having a look at Interfaces and, other than maybe Modules, it seems like the most logical next step when we eventually get to Erik's list.

One of the most common use cases (and the first example in the docs) is to provide iteration for custom types... Did you have an idea on what kind of things you were going to focus on for the Iterators concept? I saw that Fibonacci Iterator was a possible exercise, which could fall under Interfaces depending on the setup, so you may want to have a quick look at the page on interfaces before diving too far into that topic.

From what I've gathered, if we went with iteration for Interfaces, there are two possible avenues for exercises:

1. Define a type and provide iteration capabilities for it using Base.iterate methods.
2. Define an interface for a custom type system.

The second option is significantly harder than the first (both for student to do and us to write the exercise) but has the potential to be highly instructive. I guess it would be possible to sneakily make the student do the first option for Iterators (without mentioning interfaces) and then after the full introduction to Interfaces have them do the second. For example, I personally found that I had already used interfaces to define iteration before I was aware of the terminology, so I don't think it has to be explicitly sold up front for the first option.

Of course, there are many other examples of interfaces we could use beyond iteration and the two options above still hold in general, so we don't have to pigeonhole ourselves there. In any case, I figure interfaces would have to have Multiple Dispatch as a prereq, since overloading of Base methods is central to the idea.

[colinleach]

Thank you for the analysis.

You are far ahead of me in thinking about this! I'm still trying to get some of the easier stuff done, without much recent progress (a total lack of physical and mental energy has been a factor).

I'll try to speed up again, though within the last 15 minutes my main Linux installation seems to have self-destructed and won't boot. I suppose the old notion applies: just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean the world is not out to get you!

[depial]

You are far ahead of me in thinking about this!

No worries! I'm just bouncing some ideas around. I imagine I'll have to tinker quite a bit before I feel comfortable enough to be of any use in producing material for some of these topics.

...a total lack of physical and mental energy has been a factor... ...my main Linux installation seems to have self-destructed...

Maybe the world is out to make you get some good rest! ;)

[colinleach]

Maybe the world is out to make you get some good rest! ;)

It's old age having that effect. Plus I managed to get a cold in a week that hit 114 F (seemed implausible, but epidemiology data later showed there's a lot going around: adenovirus, metapneumovirus, and a few others).