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<a href="https://blog.gluegadget.com/post/2017-08-16-tapl/">Types and Programming Languages</a>
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<div class="post-meta"><time class="post-date">2017-08-16</time></div>
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#<a href="https://blog.gluegadget.com/tags/tapl/">tapl</a>
#<a href="https://blog.gluegadget.com/tags/rust/">rust</a>
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<p>February 2016, as a birthday present to myself I bought a copy of <a href="https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/">Types and Programming Languages</a>. At the time the only thing I did with it was to take a photo of it, sharing it on Twitter and congratulating myself. To be fair, I did try reading it, but it was so intimidating that I gave up very early in the book. One and a half years later I’m going to give it another go because a few things have changed.</p>
<p>First of all, I should say that I’ve no academic background in computer science—I’ve studied Zoology. I easily get frightened by any text with more than a few lines of maths in it especially when it’s heavy on symbols which I don’t know, and Google doesn’t help. I’ve had many attempts at learning maths—watching YouTube videos, reading books—but I always gave up mostly due to lack of discipline in doing the exercises. A year ago I decided to do something about it and enrolled into DIT’s <a href="http://www.dt249.ie/">B.Sc. in Information Systems and Information Technology</a>. I thought if I’m paying a substantial amount of money for a class in a relatively well-established institute it might help. To my unwelcome surprise, the course isn’t heavy on maths, but it was an immense help, discipline-wise, nonetheless.</p>
<p>The second thing was that due to some unforeseen circumstances, all of a sudden I found myself with plenty of free time and I didn’t want to waste this once in a lifetime opportunity.</p>
<p>After deciding that I want to read the book and be rigorous in doing the exercises, I had to choose a programming language to do the exercises in, and I found it a good excuse to give Rust a try.</p>
<p>I also decided to publish my progress both as in <a href="https://github.com/amir/tapl.rs">code</a> as well as in a series of blog posts, as suggested by a wise man, <a href="http://iainhull.github.io/">Iain</a>. Hence this blog.</p>
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