Greeting travelers.

The weather has been ever-so-dreary here this week. This weekend, in particular, has really been exuding gloomy November vibes. SAD season is truly here.

This has left me with plenty of time to sit inside, drink tea, hack on various things, and ponder some of the finer things in life (like Church encoding).

Advent of Code

Advent of Code is less than a month away, so this week I did a bit of prep for that. Thus far I have yet to attain all fifty stars for any year. This year I'd like to change that, but I tend to say that every year. There's always a chance that this year will be different!

I'll be using PureScript again this year. Half the fun of doing Advent of Code for me is being able to do it in a functional language, and I am still on a pretty big PureScript kick these days. PureScript is quite nice, both in terms of the language itself and the tooling surrounding it.

This year I am trying something slightly different by doing all of the puzzles within a single project. Previously I would set up a separate project for each day, which came with a lot of overhead. I took this setup out for the test drive on the 2017 puzzles and so far it feels really good.

You can check out my repo to see the setup I'll be using going in.

Programming with Something

I watched Tom Stuart's "Programming with Something" talk and would highly recommend it. I went in not really knowing what to expect (having not seen his prior talk, "Programming with Nothing"), but I walked away having learned a lot.

Back in college we covered the lambda calculus in my Programming Concepts and Paradigms course. I say "covered", but I suppose it would be more accurately described as "taught to us in the very last class before the final with the express purpose of being put on the final". Needless to say, the concept didn't really click with me at the time. However, while watching Tom's talk I could feel those seeds planted back then start to sprout, and suddenly it all made sense!

Programs as Lego Structures

I did some reminiscing on a childhood spend playing with Legos and how it intersects with my love of functional programming today. Read more about how I think about "Programs as Lego Structures".

That's all for this week!

Until the next one,

Marshall