Life after GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women

My previous post was about the end of my OPW internship task. I’ve tried learning so many different things post OPW:

• Rust language (studied it for a while, then left)
• Computer networks from Unix Network Programming (Enjoying… )
• Advanced data structures (Enjoying…)
• Dancer : I tried learning it, but didn’t get far with it!
• PSGI/Plack : Still learning it
• Scheme from SICP : I’m studying SICP from past few weeks now, but at times I got frustrated with it. Reason is that its exercises, examples were taking so much of my time. I told some perl people about it and asked if it’s normal or I’m being too dumb. Then Mark told me that he spent around 3 yrs (from 1998-2000) in studying that book & it’s normal if it’s taking time. So, I decided to read SICP slowly & without getting frustrated.

Oh evil parentheses 😥

Also, it was a bit difficult for me to understand lisp syntax, especially when to use parentheses & when not to use parentheses :D. Then, this person suggested me to try DrRacket mainly for two reasons:

• DrRacket is used in production
• It’ll help me understand lisp syntax better.

Parentheses are my new buddies 🙂

Yes! They’re! Atleast, from past two days.
So, I started learning DrRacket the day before yesterday and till now I’ve found it awesome.
The best thing I liked about DrRacket is that it deals with images the same way it deals with numbers, booleans etc., which really impressed me. Till now, I’ve never seen this feature in any other language.
For example, if you want to animate a falling rocket, then it’s so easy to do it with DrRacket, using this code:

(require 2htdp/image)
(define (create-rocket-scene height)
(place-image 50 height (empty-scene 200 200)))
;You need to right-click on the image, click on the "Copy image" & paste it in DrRacket's definition area.
(require 2htdp/universe)
(animate create-rocket-scene)


This’ll produce a very beautiful animation. You don’t need to install anything apart from DrRacket for doing this B-)
I stole the above example from here