reading

Listing out stuff I read, so I can refer back to it in the future. I would try to leave comments, but I may choose to opt-out at any moment. I do not plan for this to be a place where I store the "comprehensive notes". Takeaways section is meant to be a list of topics worth remembering, i.e the most important theorem, interesting fact, something I can tell my family during dinner.

• Read Chapters 1,2 in Quantum computing 40 years later by John Preskill on May 6th.

  Takeaways:

  • Listen to Feynman. Always.
  • NISQ -> QEC -> FTQC

• Read up to 3.3 although did not follow along Tower: Data Structures in Quantum Superposition by Charles Yuan and Michael Carbin

  Takeaways:

  • Data Structure is appropriate for use in quantum algorithm if it is: reversible, history independent and has bounded-time execution.
  • They implemented Tower in OCaml, nice.

• Read and have a clear idea about the state of Quantum Programming Language Research as of 2004 Quantum Programming Languages Survey and Bibliography by Simon J. Gay on May 6th.

• Attempted Reading Quantum Theory, the Church-Turing Principle and the Universal Quantum Computer by David Deutsch on May 6th.

• Read, followed and mostly understood Fourier Transform by Terence Tao on May 6th.

• Read, but did not get in its entirety A Simple Proof that Toffoli and Hadamard are Quantum Universal by Dorit Aharonov on May 6th.

  I need to review Abstract algebra, it has been a while.

• Read and followed Real World OCaml 2nd Edition. Chapter 2: Variables and Functions on May 6th.

  Takeaways:

  • Interestingly, only anonymous functions in OCaml are declared using the fun keyword. Functions are such an integral part of the language, that named functions just need a name, unlike something in Rust, where we have: fun main(). function is a totally different thing, and supports pattern matching out box.
  • It is "currying", not "carrying". It is named after "Curry Haskell", and not explicitly the act of a function "carrying" one of the arguments inside of it for future reference.
  • mutual recursion should be allowed combining rec with and.
  • using parenthesis around the infix operator would make it a prefix one.
  • |> is left associative, and @@ is right associative.
  • label-puning originated in OCaml? I think one of the things I should do is: create infographics of the origin of syntactic ideas in most well known programming languages. That would be cool, right?
  • Passing labeled functions as arguments we need to be careful with the ordering of labeled arguments.
  • An optional argument is erased as soon as the first positional argument defined after the optional argument is passed in.

• Finished Watching Open Quantum Assembly Language on May 5th.

  I just learned that there exists an intermediate representation to describe quantum circuits and algorithms. That makes sense. And they have a new version :).

• Finished first 30 minutes of Quantum Computing Lecture: Robin Kaarsgaard "Free Quantum Computing" on May 5th.

  I think it is important to watch stuff, where I understand only ~20%

• Skimmed through The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages An Introduction by Glynn Winskel. Chapter 1: Basic Set Theory On May 5th

  Takeaways:

  • Russell's paradox: Let $R = { x | x \notin x }.$ Then $R \in R \iff R \notin R$

• Finished Real World OCaml 2nd Edition. Chapter 1: A Guided Tour on May 5th

  Remembering stuff that I learned during CSE 130. If I have an ability to do a masters degree, I want to do something with PL, which is impossible without being fluent in at least one functional programming language. So I decided to choose Ocaml. This book is an industry standard and should refresh my knowledge about recursion, passing functions and arguments. Also OCaml has an interactive repl named utop. I really love the "clean design", and it gives me a chance to stay in the terminal, thinking I am doing something productive.

• Finished Intro to the Zig Programming Language • Andrew Kelley • GOTO 2022 on May 5th

  I think if I am exploring all the hot topics in SWE, I simply cannot pass on zig. Listening to this presentation I really liked the difference between For Profit and Non Profit companies Andrew pointed out. True, it is naive to think that the for profit business would stay at the same level of quality over time. If it does not turn into a giant "evil" corporation, product will deteriorate. On technical level I love how zig provides multiple points of entry.