Week 2 meetup

[Cody Koeninger]

Do folks want to meet up again this Friday?

Any suggestions for locations that are more accessible to people who work north?

[Dan Luu]

I was going to suggest 360 Primo as a convenient place up north, until I looked it up and saw that it's been closed for two years, which shows how much I know about coffee shops near me.

I'll show up if people want to get together, but, from the level of activity here, it doesn't seem like there's that much interest? Since the topics thread is empty for this week, and the discussion for a week's worth of material didn't fill up that much time, we could also try meeting bi-weekly.

[Cody Koeninger]

Ok - absent other strong opinions, I think our group of coworkers is likely to meet up at the same time and place this Friday, anyone's welcome to join us.

If we're going to do a bi-weekly or monthly thing, I'd be more interested in deciding on a topic in advance and getting a space with room for a projector to discuss code.

[Michael Douglass]

Oooh.. Space with a projector to discuss code.  I like it.  :)

Yes, I think the four of us will at least gather for food/coffee and discussion.  For lack of anyone posting up ideas for us to discuss, I have some fodder...

One, a question I'd like to hear some discussion/opinions on:  How do the topics we're learning help you in your professional career as a programmer?  Read another way: How can I take the functional programming I'm learning here to make myself a better programmer?

Two, let's look at each of the sections of week two briefly -- the key question being "did I miss something"?

1. Lecture 2.1: Tail recursion -- the important part I take here is that I can do REALLY DEEP RECURSION without blowing up my stack as long as I perform TAIL RECURSION.  I think that's all there is to this section.  Is there more?
2. Lecture 2.2: Higher-Order Functions -- the lines between functions and variables are now blurred.  You can pass functions as parameters to other functions, and you can then call them.  From my experience with this lesson, this is very similar to other languages ability to have anonymous functions, lambdas, etc.
3. Lecture 2.3: Currying -- more on Higher-Order functions.  Functions can have multiple sets of arguments, and you can "curry" values into them by doing a partial call and storing the results as a function in a variable.
4. Lecture 2.4: Example: Funding Fixed Points -- hahah.. I apparently skipped this video.  :)  So I'm sure I missed something.
5. Lecture 2.5: Syntax -- Oh EBNF, how I've missed you!

Past that, I'd really like to SEE how other people solved the assignments.  I'd like opinions and comments on how I solved the assignments.  I'm considering putting them up in a Google document so you can all comment on it.

Those are my thoughts.

MikeDoug

[Dan Luu]

I like the idea of looking at solutions; I have something that passes their tests, but I doubt it's the simplest or most idiomatic solution.

This is skipping ahead a bit, but I've got a question on one of the week three lectures. In one of those lectures, it's mentioned that there's no way to change operator precedence of overloaded operators. For those of you that have used Scala, have you ever found that to be an annoying limitation? I'm in the habit of only very rarely using overloading, so I doubt I'd notice it; just curious.

[Cody Koeninger]

I think there's more to tail recursion than just really deep recursion.  SICP tries to make the point that iterative or recursive processes can be done with instructions that are recursive (tail calls and an explicit accumulator) or iterative (manage an explicit stack).  They're two sides of the same coin.

I think tail call elimination in general can be important outside of recursion, e.g. chained method calls in an OO language.

On Friday, October 5, 2012 12:16:15 AM UTC-5, Michael Douglass wrote:

[Norman Richards]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 12:32 AM, Dan Luu <dan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I like the idea of looking at solutions; I have something that passes their
> tests, but I doubt it's the simplest or most idiomatic solution.
>

I've decided to put my code on github:

https://github.com/orb/coursera-scala

I didn't spend much time on the exercise, and I haven't made any
attempt to clean up any code. But my solutions are there.

I haven't started week 3 yet. I was out of town and just watched the
videos yesterday.