Prologophile
I’m going to teach Prolog next semester!
To Dutch students starting out in Artificial Intelligence!
It’s going to be great fun, shaping their innocent beginning-programmer minds. The course is about half Prolog and half AI-as-search; and I’m completely In Charge. (There will be assistents for the lab sessions, we expect about 30-40 students so it’s a bit much for one person to give individual help.)
Anyone who has talked to me in the last six months will know that I’ve been a bit stressed about my prospects after graduation. The job market for programmers is depressed, and for recent philosophy-of-language graduates it’s nonexistent. Not being from the EU makes life even more difficult — indeed, for a while I was worried that I might have to leave the country even before my defence. All those problems look set to evaporate now, at least for another half-year. If I do a good job they might even want me back, who knows?
Comments
Richard O'Keefe? Hah, he taught me way-back-when (functional, maybe? I don't remember). No, we're using Bratko.
The job market is made much trickier when you're not from the EU. Outside of university work I would have to draw an unrealistically large salary to convince the Dutch government to give me a work permit. (And, of course, I was thinking mainly of somewhat esoteric languages... Although I was looking into C# for a while, and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.)
Congratulations Mr D. You'll be pleased to continuing your path up the ivory tower.
You were taught by O'Keefe?! Ohmygawd...! (Squeaking sound) I mean, lucky you. Right, you're both from NZ. I've read parts of his Craft of Prolog and it is one of the most illuminating programming (or at least, Prolog programming) books I've ever read. It was darn difficult, of course, but nearly every code gave you the "aha!" feeling when you finally got it. And Bratko is... Well, kinda nice. It is nice that it tries to teach Prolog and AI at the same time. But I don't consider its code to be really elegant.
As for the job market... Yeah, not being from the EU may complicate your life a little bit. Though, if it makes you feel better, I know at least one person from the US who was able to successfully obtain a Dutch work permit. And for some reasons his case was a bit more difficult than yours.
As for C#, I've read some articles about LINQ and I was very positively surprised. Though I will stay with my Python for now, thank-you-very-much ;)
"...nearly every code fragment gave you the “aha!” feeling..." I meant, of course.
He's an incredibly smart guy, and very knowledgeable. Unfortunately he doesn't have much patience for less smart and knowledgeable people (i.e., most of us), which can be pretty intimidating when you're a clueless student. I wish I could resit his courses now, I'd get an enormous amount more out of them.
C#: the cool thing is that it's slowly incorporating more and more functional techniques and technology. LINQ is Haskell list comprehension, and to get that working type-checked you need functions as first-class objects, &c. &c. Nice to see that kind of idea finally making its way into a commercial language.
(I've added The Craft of Prolog to my wishlist. I can well imagine it's darn difficult, and enlightening.)
Congratulations!! That's really excellent news!
Thanks, yeah, I'm excited about it!
Congratulations! Sounds seriously cool. Do you plan hitting students in the back of the head with a copy of O'Keeffe's The Craft of Prolog to facilitate illumination?
As for the job market, it is in reality a lot less depressed than the impression you would get from reading the news... Unless you are thinking exclusively of Haskell, Lisp or Prolog programming, but then you shouldn't be very surprised :-)