Casa De Morrill

In high school, I found every way I could to avoid having to learn foreign languages, especially ones you’d have to speak. So, I took Latin my first two years. Then, I had to take something else at ASMS, so I took German. Although I enjoy speaking foreign languages, I hate learning them. I’ve never been good at picking up other languages, mainly because I’ve always had a hard time relating them to English, thus being able to learn another language through a language I’m already comfortable with.

Computer languages is a completely different story. I love learning new computer languages, but I still have the same problem with them that I do with foreign languages. I’m fluent with a couple, but I have a hard time relating those languages to other ones so that the other languages are easier to learn. No more! This term, I’m taking a class called Concepts of Programming Languages. It’s a graduate level course. CS524 to be specific. I had class last night and now that we’ve gone over what the class is meant to accomplish, I’m really psyched. This summer, we’re going to tear programming languages down to their bare essentials and see how and why they were designed to get a better understanding of the language itself in comparison with other languages. We have four programs to write and none of them are going to be written in languages we’ve already been taught at school. I get to write in Perl, Prolog, and LISP/Scheme. I finally get to learn Perl, which is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

I’m hoping that I stay as psyched for this class as I’m starting out. I like the teacher. She wants the class to be a discussion class, which is cool. It’ll help me stay awake in an evening class. I can also understand her. No offense to minorities, but we have so many minority teachers in the CS and CPE departments and they tend to be really hard to understand when they talk. This is a treat for me to understand what she’s saying. I’m sure I’ll be posting more about summer classes as the term progresses. This might actually turn out to be an enjoyable term at school. Surprise, surprise…