Overview

• Preliminaries.
  • Admin.
  • About the course.
  • Schedule.
  • Expectations.
  • Questions.
• Source code management systems.
• A quick demo of Git.
• Homework!

Preliminaries

Admin

• Attendance!
• Although the title of the outline is Git, we're going to do some first day of class stuff.
  • We'll also talk about version control in general, and not just about Git.
• I've modified my plans for research since early fall.
  
  • I'll give a quick overview today.
  • You can hear more at 4:30 today.
  • You can hear even more next week in this class.
• The change in research plans means that the way I teach this class has changed since last year.
  • I expect most of you will find the new version as valuable as the old.

About the Course and my Research

• "Sam, we'd be much more efficient if we studied the background material (libraries, languages, tools) before the summer. Teach students in the spring." -> Course
  • Big open course
  • And not all good candidates sign up
  • But cool stuff anyway
• Functional problem solving
  • "Everything is nested"
  • Model: Functions transmute data (create new data from old)
  • "Stateless" - doesn't change the environment (in the ideal)
  • Functions as data ("first-class values")
  • Powerful, elegant, maybe even beautiful
• New project
  • Functional problem solving
  • Image making
  • Outreach
  • Conclusion: Math over images
  • [Slideshow]

Schedule

• See Web site.
• Sam is incompetenet with dates. No big surprise.

Expectations

• Show up. [No more than two unexcused absences]
• Participate!
• Weekly homework. Feel free to give up after two hours.
• Post that homework in public. [No more than two missed HW]

The Lisp Article(s):

Readings * What Made Lisp Different? * Revenge of the Nerds

• A new way to think about Lisp, but don't remember the details.
• Lisp is old (late 1950's) and may have been the first language to have real conditionals.
• Felt like an apology
• Amazing that something so old is still in use. Maybe it's good.
• Power is interesting.
• We will come back to this power.

Source code management systems

Real projects have

• lots of files
• lots of people working on them (simultaneously)
• lots of simultaneous goals

Keeping all of that in synch is difficult

• processes (rules for people communicating)
• tools for supporting the processes

Typical activities we need to do as we work with source code

• Communicate a change to the rest of the team
• Find out about changes the rest of the team made - pull
  • The code
  • Why they made the changes
• Merge changes

Other activities

• Mark a project as ready for release / version number
• Start a variant of the project so you can work in isolation for awhile (branch)
• Rollback to an old version (or see an old version) (or see differences)

A quick demo of Git

Homework