I finished the first 5 weeks of teaching for Programming as Problem Solving this week, which marks the point in the course where I hand over lecturing duties to Ranald Clouston. Tomorrow I will be up early to invigilate the mid-term exam, which I spent the last week setting up. I think it will be sufficiently brutal to give a shock to those students who have not sufficiently engaged, while still being fair and achievable for that handful of students who are attending classes and strongly engaging with the course.

I was absolutely mortified in the first lecture of my final week when only two students (out of almost 120) showed up. I later found out that my handful of regular attendees had a maths exam the same time, which lessened the impact somewhat.

I have no doubt that most of those who actually attend my lectures will do well. They are very on the ball, and they seem to enjoy my lectures. One asked what other subjects I teach, and another gave me a delicious carrot cake after my final lecture, which was a very touching gesture!

I've been putting the finishing touches on the server for the ICFP '25 Programming Contest, which I am organising. With Jack Stodart and Alex Mirrlees-Black we will put it through a test run this week, if I can find the time.

I wrote the server in Kotlin and used AWS Lambda, AWS DynamoDB and other Amazon Web Services. The point of this approach was so that I wouldn't have to worry about scalability, but I am slightly nervous that the costs will be much higher than I expected. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I must say that the state of documentation for AWS is simply atrocious. On one occasion, in desperation to find some answers to what I thought were simple queries, I turned to the dreaded bots for help. They gave me incorrect answers, of course, but I was at least able to Kagi search my way to success based on their answer. Still, I feel like I need to go to confession and receive absolution for interacting at all with those infernal machines.

Another concern is that I am flying from Sydney to Portugal while the contest will be going on. I'm hoping Jack will be able to monitor things without me, but mostly I'm going on faith that nothing will explode.

I'm theming this year's contest around one of my all-time favourite novels, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Some of the folks on our Discord channel have been enjoying that.

My honours students have been hard at work on the next generation of Holbert lately. Mio Wu has finished implementing an engine (including pattern unification) for higher order terms, and is now investigating Functions-as-constructors higher-order unification for implementation in Holbert-ng. Also Josh Brown has been looking into E-unification modulo associativity, so that we can represent syntax and parsing rules in Holbert. Both have made excellent progress, with basic versions of their respective unification algorithms already in place and working.

I'm hoping that I will have time to work on the UI side of things again sometime in September, but we shall see!

MIHI autem nimis honoráti sunt amíci tui, Deus: nimis confortátus est principátus eórum.

EGO autem sicut olíva fructificávi in domo Dómini, sperávi in misericórdia Dei mei: et exspectábo nomen tuum, quóniam bonum est ante conspéctum sanctórum tuórum.

Inclína Dómine, aurem tuam ad me, et exáudi me: salvum fac servum tuum, Deus meus, sperántem in te: miserére mihi, Domine, quóniam ad te clamávi tota die.

Today our choir at All Saints Ainslie sang Anton Brucker's classic Locus Iste:

Locus iste a Deo factus est.	This place is made by God,
Inaestimábile sacraméntum,	A priceless sacrament,
Irreprehensíbilis est.	Beyond reproach.
Locus iste a Deo factus est.	This place is made by God.

Strangely, it seems that Roman Catholics ignored the feast today, just celebrating the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time instead. Not sure why that was happening.

I didn't go to Evensong today, because I'm so busy setting up the ICFP programming contest and arranging my move to Dickson.