With the cancellation of FProPer this year due to low submissions, I believe I have finally finished my reviewing marathon for this year. I served on the PLDI (11 papers), ICFP (7 papers), APLAS (4 papers) and Haskell Symposium (4 papers) PCs this year, plus reviewed one paper for the Journal of Functional Programming, giving me a total of 27 papers reviewed this year. Now that that's over with, I will focus my attention on preparing the ICFP Programming Contest and preparing to teach first-year computing next semester.

I will be teaching COMP1100, the first year introductory programming course at the Australian National University. This is the off-session so the enrolments are only about 100 students. This is my first time convening the very first course of a computing degree. For many students, this may be the first time they take any university course.

I am thinking about the kinds of messages I want to impart in the very first lecture. Looking over last year's slides, I think there's a number of good messages there, but it's not particularly punchy and probably didn't sink in to students. There's talk about how to study programming, how to maintain mental and physical health at university, the university policy on genAI and academic misconduct, where to find resources etc. but there's no unifying theme to it all.

I think the main thing is to encourage them to cultivate in themselves the kind of natural curiosity that motivates self-study. Ideally, the students should view my lectures, notes, and other output as resources for them to use to learn programming. Not merely as requirements placed on them to pass the course and thereby get a degree.

I think I will emphasise the science part of Computer Science and encourage students to think like a scientist:

• Answer curiosity with experimentation: A common theme in my interactions with first year students is that they will often ask me questions to which they could easily find out the answer by trying it for themselves. The refrain should be try it and see!
• Reason with mathematical principles: We are programming in Haskell, and I hope to communicate the mathematical connection, sneaking some semantics in by the wayside.
• Practice good lab safety: Looking after posture, eye health, taking breaks, drinking water, and supporting each other.
• Maintain scientific integrity: Only taking credit for work done, and properly attributing work taken from elsewhere (including from generative AI bots).
• Practise skills: I'm a firm believer in the notion that skills such as programming are learned by doing: the more practice they get, the more proficient they will be.

Then, to cover the computer part of Computer Science, I will tell the story of human computers such as Dorothy Vaughan (whose biography has clearly been taken down recently from NASA's website, presumably as a result of the current administration), through to the female programmers of ENIAC, then mentioning the first programmer, Ada Lovelace. Based on her quote on "the science of operations" and Dijkstra's famous quote about telescopes, I plan to shift the focus from computers to computing more generally. Then I will give a survey of various subfields of computer science to give them an idea of the big picture of our field.

I'm the organiser for the ICFP Programming Contest this year. After some time working on it, I'm starting to think that ICFP might want to consider either letting this contest be discontinued, or letting it be run by the participants, separately from ICFP proper.

1. It's a lot of work. I was warned that it was a lot of work when I agreed to do it, and I was still unprepared for the amount of work required. I don't think asking a full-time research and teaching academic to make this kind of time investment for no compensation is reasonable, and I would not have agreed had I known it would be this onerous. This is all to the benefit not of the research community, but of hobbyist competitive programmers.
2. It isn't achieving anything for the FP community. In the past, it may have had the benefit of providing a host of nontrivial problems to which functional programming could be applied, but the reality is that most languages have incorporated functional features now, and functional programming is no longer in a tiny niche that must endeavour to prove itself.
3. The overlap in the intended audiences is not large. ICFPC is mostly comprised of competitive programmers, not functional programming students or researchers. The top placed entries in this contest rarely use FP languages, and some are not even exposed to FP ideas. I've heard that prior iterations which incorporated FP directly into the fabric of the problem received complaints.

I fully acknowledge that a significant group of competitive programmers look forward to the ICFPC, and that the ICFPC occupies a unique space in that scene, where micro-optimising standard algorithms is standard practice and days-long problem solving is not common. But asking ICFP and ICFP-affiliated academics to provide this contest as a service to these hobbyists with dubious benefit to the research community seems pointless to me. Those who participate in the contest should organise it, and it should probably be split off from ICFP itself.

Dum clamárem ad Dóminum, exaudívit vocem meam, ab his qui appropínquant mihi: et humiliávit eos, qui est ante saécula, et manet in ætérnum: iacta cogitátum tuum in Dómino, et ipse te enútriet.

While we were short on numbers, the choir of All Saints Ainslie performed the schmaltzy Ave Verum Corpus by Edward Elgar.

Ave verum corpus natum ex María Vírgine,	Hail, true body, born from the Virgin Mary,
Vere passum, immolátum in cruce pro hómine,	True suffering, sacrificed on the cross for Man,
Cuius latus perforátum vero fluxit sánguine,	From whose pierced side truly flowed blood,
Esto nobis prægustátum mortis in exámine.	Be for us a foretaste in death's trial.
O clemens, O pie, O dulcis Iesu fili Maríæ.	O kind! O blessed! O sweet Jesus son of Mary.

I went to Evensong at St. John the Baptist's in Reid again today. This time they had a very skilled flautist playing along with the organ for the prelude and the postlude, which was lovely. The choir was pretty ordinary as usual, but it is still a restorative service because of the beautiful church and the lovely language of the 1662 BCP.