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The Near Future

I've had several different ambitions over the past seven years or so of my life. Among the ones that stick around in my head, I've wanted to:

• Make a proof assistant so that I could understand mathematical proofs at a deeper level.
• Create a dependently typed programming language.
• Create text based games with a dependently typed programming language and then explore that game's "world" with the type/proof system of that language.
• Understand concepts like the Lambda Cube.

My undergraduate and master's studies centered on mathematics with a minor in computer science. So I fell just short of taking a solid introduction course to computer science theory and I also never took a good compiler course. Two classes I really wish I was forced to take in hindsight because understanding and knowing how to implement the machines that can recognize languages in the Chomsky Hierarchy are total blindspots in my education and these blindspots are necessary for every single one of my ambitions listed above.

Not too long ago I picked up the first edition of "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation" by John E. Hopcroft and Jeffry D. Ullman which is sometimes referred to as the "Cinderella Book". It has the material that I need to learn and so that's where my focus is going to be for the next several blog posts. I'm hoping to develop these basic machines that recognize languages in Scheme, a language that I have a passing familiarity with but would enjoy more exposure to.

So stay tuned :)