Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

With regard to my current side projects at home, I've started to ponder graduate school. Grad school is something I'm always thinking about because I'd love to teach computer science at the college level at some point. Neural networks and genetic algorithms have always been interesting, but lately I've been thinking more about programming languages.

I've been doing a lot of Perl for the past several months and I think I've validated my preconceived notions about the language. Perl is one of those languages that fills programmers with a variety of emotions. It seems to be heavy at the opposite ends of the spectrum. People tend to either hate it or love it. Even within the Perl community, there seems to be strife about certain topics.

My opinion about Perl is an ambivalent one. I often feel like I'm the child in the middle of a divorce. The language has some great features and I have a lot of fun programming in it. On the other hand, it's a bastard language and I despise it. Either way, it's a great language to talk about in an academic manner.

Perl has dynamic and lexical scoping. You can program in an object oriented, imperative, or functional style. It also has mappings to Prolog, so you can program in a logical style if you like. For subroutines that are referentially transparent, you can use a memoization module. You can use closures, which means you can do currying. Virtually every programming languages concept is manifested in the language.

To bring the story to an end. This prompted me to Google for "programming languages graduate school". The first result from the search shows a list of the top ten graduate schools. UT is number 8 (woot!). The second result is the one I found most interesting:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

I thought the page was an interesting read. Enjoy :)