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Grad School Crisis

“The grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had somewhat of a crisis with grad school.  I’ve found that I hate 1 of my classes, despise C++ (which is required for compilers), and just simply don’t have enough time to breath.  This pretty much describes a typical computer science student’s life, however, I was pushed over the edge 2 weeks ago.

Two weeks ago, I was hit really hard, all at once.  I had 3 exams in one week, and 2 programs due.  If you’ve ever tried to write a compiler or a remote procedure program and tried to study for a test at the same time, you’ll know what I mean.  To make matters worse, CMU told me I own them $2350.  This is all because they over refunded me earlier in the semester, yet failed to realize it until 2 months later.  Not only that, but I had 150 papers to grade.

It all stacked up, and made me realize that I don’t really enjoy grad school all that much.  So, I started applying for jobs.  So far I have been rather successful with getting call backs, but, CMU has decided that they may be willing to work with me.

The grass is always greener on the other side.  If I quit grad school, I’ll wish I didn’t.  If I don’t quit grad school, I’ll wish I had.

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Other Programming

Functional Programming with Erlang

For the past 8 weeks in my graduate operating systems course, we’ve been dealing with the issues of inter-process communication in massively parallel situations.  For development of such applications, we’ve been using an operating system called Inferno (of Plan 9 origins) which has a built in language called Limbo.  Limbo is a great language for learning network programming and multi-threaded programming.  It has communication channels which are typed, so you can pass whatever you want along them without pre-processing the data.  However, you still have to manage all of those channels.  It also has a nice C + Pascal style syntax:

message := “Hello World!”;
sys->print(“%s\n”, message);

While discussing languages that support massive concurrency with my professor, the subject of functional programming came up.  I mentioned to him that I wanted to learn a functional language, but wasn’t sure where to start.  He suggested Erlang due to it’s easy support for massive concurrency.  My question to my readers (if I have any left), is do you have any experience with programming multi-threaded and/or distributed programs with Erlang?  Is it worth the time to learn, or would my efforts be better off elsewhere?