mike 🎃 @vollmerm@types.pl

I can't imagine what it feels like to be accepted to a PhD program, and then told my CS background is so weak that I have to essentially go take a first year course to learn the basics.

We have a few incoming PhD students in the PL group that did their undergrad here. Since we don't teach PL, and don't even really teach discrete math to our undergrads, they're having to do a lot of catch-up.

Right now we're helping them work through the first-year CS foundations course from Cambridge.

Does anyone here know any good references for optimizing tag/bounds checks in dynamic languages? Like, not eliminating them statically, but making the checks themselves efficient?

proof general trying to be helpful by replacing all instances of the string "complex" with blackboard C, even in comments

I would have more sympathy for the students that failed this exam if it seemed like they really tried.

No, the failing students answered nearly every question with irrelevant/nonsense answers, often clearly copy+pasted from the internet.

So 60-70 is considered a good score here in the UK. Only a few students are getting those kinds of scores, but I think even those scores really aren't equivalent to "A" work. I don't want to be like a weird CS elitist, I'm sure the students are trying and going through a lot, but like, how did they take the whole course and not learn how to fill out a truth table or remember what XOR is?

I haven't taught any courses here yet but I had to do some exam marking this summer and it has been very demoralizing. The students are doing extremely poorly and failing to answer even basic questions. Lots of scores <20%. Lots of identical, wrong answers, probably shared in a group chat.

I have a PhD student starting next semester and I'm a bit stressed out about it. I know so many people who had bad experiences in grad school because of their advisors, and I really don't want to be like that.

When I try to write/swipe 'thesis' on my phone it has been auto-correcting it to 'threat'

Just got my org-mode files syncing to my phone, to an Android task management app.

Sometimes when I try to paste code into Keynote it interprets the code as a table...

We have to book conference rooms using Teams. This means every room in the building has a Teams account, and you "invite" the room to your scheduled meeting. If the room accepts the invite, then you have successfully booked that room.

60 exams graded, 170 to go.

School facilities insisted on putting this big metal cabinet thing in my office. They call it a "tambour unit" and it's blocking my whiteboard. I didn't ask for it and I don't know that they expect me to do with it.

🖼

I've been doing some background reading on program synthesis for a grant proposal, and I love this 1977 paper "A Methodology for LISP Program Construction from Examples"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/321992.322002

for what feels like the hundredth time I'm writing a generic paragraph about how "software bugs are bad and we want to prevent them"

This is the only book about Java that I own.