What Next? From January 2018

We're going to meet on 21st Nov 2017 to decide what the club should focus on from January 2018 (in the interim we plan to do one-off meetings or similar).

This page can be used to collect and expand on ideas. If you're even slightly interested in attending, your ideas are very welcome! They don't have to be specific books or papers you'd like to read - they can be subject areas you're interesting, e.g. "3D graphics". Let us know even if you can't make the decision meeting, and we'll try to capture everyone's input.

See the last two "what's next" pages for things we've previously considered:

• 17th January 2017
• 8th September 2015

Ideas

Subject Areas / Areas of Interest

• 3D Graphics
  • What even is a shader?
  • Book / Source options:
    • Book of Shaders
    • Real-time Rendering
    • Physically-based Rendering
• Game algorithms
  • Map generation
  • Primitive AI (but why limit ourselves?)
• How git works
• Event sourcing
• The Nile graphics language
• How to actually implement a lambda calculus
  • We've done this using term rewriting, but it doesn't usually work like that. To quote @tomstuart "it doesn’t admit any real notion of “compilation” — your runtime representation is a term. [Whereas] what you really want is to define (spoilers) some kind of abstract machine whose semantics exactly match those of the term rewriting we’ve seen, but does it in less space and time and without needing to manipulate raw ASTs"
  • See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine

Books / Other Source Materials

• To Mock a Mockingbird
• 10 technical papers every programmer should read at least twice
• Category Theory for Programmers
• Write yourself a Scheme in 48 hours

Stuff people would like to explore incidentally to the main topic

• Haskell