Author Archives: Brent

About Brent

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Hendrix College. Functional programmer, mathematician, teacher, pianist, follower of Jesus.

The generic-random library, part 1: simple generic Arbitrary instances

Posted on September 20, 2016

In a previous post I pointed out that we know all the theory to make nice, principled, practical random generators for recursive algebraic data types; someone just needed to step up and do the work. Well, Li-yao Xia took up … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, haskell | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Meeting people at ICFP in Nara

Posted on September 15, 2016

In less than 24 hours I’m getting on a plane to Japan (well, technically, Dallas, but I’ll get to Japan eventually). As I did last year, I’m making an open offer here: leave a comment on this post, and I … Continue reading →

Posted in meta | Tagged | 6 Comments

Deep work and email habits

Posted on September 2, 2016

Lately I have been enjoying Cal Newport’s writing on work, and particularly his new book Deep Work which I am in the middle of reading (definitely recommended). His basic thesis is about the power of sustained, focused, distraction-free work on … Continue reading →

Posted in meta | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Academic integrity: context and concrete steps

Posted on August 21, 2016

Continuing from my previous post, I wanted to write a bit about why I have been thinking about academic integrity, and what, concretely, I plan to do about it. So, why have I been thinking about this? For one thing, … Continue reading →

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Academic integrity and other virtues

Posted on August 18, 2016

I have been thinking a lot recently about academic integrity. What does it mean? Why do we care—what is it we fundamentally want students to do and to be? And whatever it is, how do we go about helping them … Continue reading →

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

POGIL workshop

Posted on August 7, 2016

A few weeks ago I attended a 3-day training workshop in St. Louis, put on by the POGIL project. I attended a short POGIL session at the SIGCSE CS education conference in March and was sufficiently impressed to sign up for … Continue reading →

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

New Haskell Symposium paper on “twisted functors”

Posted on August 4, 2016

Satvik Chauhan, Piyush Kurur and I have a new paper which will appear at the 2016 Haskell Symposium in Japan: How to Twist Pointers without Breaking Them Although pointer manipulations are used as a primary motivating example, at heart the … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments