TermiSoc’s annual general meeting was Tuesday; against my better judgement, I put myself forward for the position of president. Showing a lack of common sense that’s astounding even to people with experience of TermiSoc, they actually voted for me. So basically, I’m screwed.
I’ve been teaching myself Haskell; I found a tutorial that doesn’t assume you already get functional programming, and it’s really quite a nice language; I was going to try learning Scheme, after Dan’s tutorial on Monday, but the parentheses were driving me insane. The main problem I’m having with Haskell is dealing with its type system and the IO monad; I keep getting told that I can’t do things because my variables are IO strings or whatever, instead of normal ones. Other than that, it’s a really nice language; maybe I’ll do a tutorial on it next year.
Smalltalk and C++ are still on my <span class="createlink"><a href="http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/ikiwiki.cgi?page=about%2Flanguages%2Fcomputer&from=journal%2Fentries%2F2008%2F03%2Fmisc-updates&do=create" rel="nofollow">?</a>list</span>, since they’re mandatory for the final-year course I want to take (Plymouth has a system whereby you can get a "Computing and Such-And-Such" degree instead of plain Computing, if you choose from a specific subset of the normally-allowed final-year modules; I’m going for Computing and Software Development). I’ll spend some time on both of them over the summer, if all goes to plan.
Just for kicks, the latest psychotic dribble from the Roman Catholic Church: apparently, abortion offends "the dignity and rights of women". They’d be more credible if pro-choicers hadn’t been saying for years that banning abortion does exactly that. Bishop Girotti, you fail.