Happy New Year

Happy New Year! 🎊

The spring semester is almost here, and I am trying to capitalize on my remaining Winter Break by reading some books and wrapping up some side projects.

In my last post, I mentioned that I had started The Mythical Man-Month. A few weeks ago I finished it, and here are some of the key takeaways I gleaned from it:

• Flowcharts can mystify those who seek to understand a program, whereas data tables can make the answers to questions about it more obvious.
  • I like this idea because it posits that the data a program is trying to manage should speak for itself. When programming, I feel it is best practice to separate one’s logic from their data, and this quote reflects that sentiment.
• Everything is best in the beginning
  • As I understand it, the idea here is that a program works best when it is first released, and will slowly deteriorate in quality as maintenance needs to be performed. I think there is some truth to this. As a system ages a number of new developers may be assigned to maintain it, and this could compromise the conceptual integrity of the system.
• “Plan to throw one away”
  • The meaning of this quote is that when constructing a system, one should, one should expect the first version to suffer from many shortcomings and eventually need to be “thrown away”. This plan is tricky however, since if one does this consciously they may accidentally create two lackluster systems. Even worse, after throwing away the first system, one could make the second system too broad in scope, resulting in a sprawling mess (see the Second System Effect). This veracity of Brook’s assertion here has been contested over the years; more of a discussion on it can be found here.
• Critical path charts are critical
  • This is more of something I personally picked up from the book. While I often employ project management tools such as Trello when working on my own personal projects, and create ERDs when making apps that interact with a database, I have never used a critical path chart. Next time I do a game jam with friends, I may suggest we create one to help us stay generally on schedule.

After finishing that book, I decided to brush up on my functional programming skills by reading Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!.

I programmed in Haskell while taking a programming languages course at UCF taught by Dr. Gary Leavens, and I really enjoyed it. Since then I’ve wanted to learn more about Haskell and functional programming, and now that I’ve finished reading this book I feel like I have a decent grasp on the language. Of all the functional programming concepts, I think the idea of folds interest me the most. Something about the thought of specifying the manner in which operations are performed on a dataset so that the operations can be abstracted away and created ad-hoc via anonymous functions piques my interest 🤓. I’m not sure if I’ll be building any projects in Haskell any time soon, but at least I can finally say that I know what a monad is 😃 (spoiler: a value with context)

Oh, and last Friday night I finished a new game, Runelock! I started this one all the way back in summer, made zero progress on it during the fall semester, and finally finished it a few days ago. Besides being busy with class, work, and applying to grad school, I neglected to finish the project because the last thing I had left to do was create the menus and add the music and sound effects. This was my first project in Godot, and I was worried that it would be difficult to do this; luckily putting these finishing touches on the game proved to be rather easy. I may go back and add more sound effects and the option to toggle the music and SFX audio separately in the future. Anyway, you can check it out here! (Also I’ve been alerted that the game doesn’t work if one tries to play it in the Itch.io desktop app. If you face this issue, try playing it in your browser instead).

Finally, this week I began reading Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (commonly known as “The Dragon Book”, due to the dragon on the cover [which is purple in the 2nd edition of the book and reminds me of Figment, haha]). I am reading this book because next semester I am planning to contribute to a project that one of my prior professors, Dr. Paul Gazzillo, helped create called SuperC. SuperC is a parser which can parse both C and its preprocessor (which is notoriously difficult to parse). A more detailed explanation of SuperC can be found here. I am hoping to contribute to SuperC by fixing some of the bugs that have lingered since its initial release in 2012, and I think reading the Dragon Book (particularly the chapters on lexing and parsing) will help me better understand SuperC and thus be able to debug it more effectively. Truthfully I am a little nervous, but I am very grateful that I have been given the opportunity to contribute to a project like this 🙂