In many ways we might be entering a golden age for learning CS. After years of hard work by many many people, more and more schools are offering CS, states are making standards (mixed opinions on these), and in some cases, requirements are being implemented. In one interesting way, though, for the self-learner I'm noticing that we're leaving what I think was a golden age. You might say, "but Mike, there are online videos and tutorials for almost everything these days" and that's true but on the other hand, many types of resources that were common around 10 years ago are no longer being made available.

I'm leaving our next elisp project for when I get back from my vacation but realized I could make a short video with some preliminaries - some elisp tools that we'll need that we can get out of the way. Specifically, elisp's built in data structures. We've already used the list data structure and in this video we go a bit more in depth. Lists are great for, well, list processing but they're not great for random access.

Relating to the linkedin post that spawned my last blog post a friend noted: … why should it be the burden on companies trying to hire folks with those skillsets to also teach those skillsets? Isn’t that what educational institutions are supposed to do (git, etc.)? Even though companies, if they actually cared about equity and diversity would be better served to take on this burden, the reality is that they haven't and it's either left for students on their own, or as I commented on in my post colleges.

Just work on an open source project. That's a frequent refrain given to college students. What's the best way to set yourself up for an internship or job? do well in your classes prepare for the ridiculous technical interviews by doing lots of problems and interview prep build a personal project or better yet, contribute to open source Everyone gives this advice and and in truth it's good advice. The problem is that while this is an easy ask for well to do students at "elite" institutions where the majority have little to do other than their courseworkand they're mostly living 24/7 on campus it's a much bigger ask for the low income student at the commuter school.

Another school year is starting. Hunter College's classes started last week and public school K12 teachers went back yesterday. I've been having some "back to school dreams" and, yeah, already missing being with the kids but not missing those opening meetings and the rest of the nonsense. Still, I'm thinking about what this school year will bring in terms of CS. The elephant in the room is just the same as what we closed out with last Spring - AI - specifically generative AI.

In this video, we're finally putting everything together for the function-header project. for the most part, it's just putting a function wrapper (defun) around code we've already written but there area a few new things. In order to parse the parameter string we use a few interesting functions. The parameter string might look something like this "int a, double d, int something, char c" - type name pairs separate by a comma and space.

It's back to school time and in addition to all the usual back to school angst and excitement it's also time for the networks to stream all those teacher movies. Lots of a-list actors have been in teacher movies and many are really entertaining but I've also found many of them to be problematic. It's not because many of them are "white savior" films, even though, yeah, that too, but rather because many are indirectly demeaning to teachers and the teaching profession in general.

Today's video gets us closer to our function header, um, function. It'll take one more video to get there but today's video goes over the programmatic elisp that we'll need. Before we get to that, a couple of elisp regex niceties. To be honest, I didn't know that these existed when I made the last video so thanks for those of you who made me aware. First is the built in rx macro.

Passing another miletone on the way to retirement this week. I didn't think it would be this many steps - I figured I'd say I'm retiring, fill out a form, and be done. It turns out it's a multi stage process. This week, my contract with Hunter officially ends and as of Friday I'm on Travia leave - that's terminal leave to public school teachers. I basically get full pay and benefits while my reserved sick days get used up at a 2 sick for one real day rate.

Our next elisp project us going to write a function that will automatically generate function headers. This was actually the first useful elisp I ever wrote around thirty years ago. I forget how I wrote it then so this is a total rewrite. Nowadays we have Javadoc for java and tools like Sphinx for other languages. If we write specially formatted comments in our code, these tools will pull out the comments and build a web site or document with hyperlinked documentation.