CS371p Spring 2021: Ethan Tan

OOP Blog Post #1

Where did you grow up?

Plano, TX

What high school did you attend?

Plano West Senior High School

What was your favorite extracurricular activity in high school?

Orchestra by far. There was a wonderful community in the orchestra program, to which I contributed to as an orchestra officer. I really enjoyed all the music I played in my high school orchestra as well as out-of-school youth orchestras, all-state orchestra, and UTSO last year, before the pandemic. My instrument is the cello, although I also know a bit of bass thanks to a year of jazz band.

Why are you majoring in CS?

I actually didn’t have much of a background in CS coming out of high school besides taking AP Computer Science. But I found it pretty fun and I wasn’t terrible at it, and my interest has only grown since then.

Why are you in this class?

This was a very highly-recommended class from my peers. The fact that we’re using C++ is also a nice bonus, since I had a taste of it last semester in CS439 and I want to continue learning it — it’s become one of my favorite programming languages, although I’m not exactly a programming language polyglot.

How much C++ do you already know?

As mentioned above, I started using C++ just last semester, but I think I’ve learned a fair bit since then. I would like to consider myself fairly comfortable with C++, but I’m sure there’s still a lot to learn (for example, I’ve barely used the standard libraries).

How did you feel about the cold calling?

I don’t mind it. Seems like a good idea, especially in a large class where it might be harder for students to stay engaged.

What made you happy this week?

Bill Wurtz has ascended to the third dimension.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Even though it is very fun, don’t overuse point-free Haskell. Something like:

fix $ (<*>id).((.)(<*>).((<*>((/=)<*>)).((.)(.).(bool id.))))

while comical, isn’t very practical. Not that the code above is particularly useful (it finds the fixpoint of a function from a starting value), I mainly wrote it for the fun of eta-reducing weird code…