When I first started programming, I often frequented many IRC channels on freenode to learn Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript. There were many natural languages spoken on those channels and I was inspired to write an IRC bot that would translate their words. Alas, I slowly retired from those channels and no longer found the use for such a bot.

Then, I arrived at Hacker School. We use Zulip for our internal chat at Hacker School, and although 99% of the conversation there is in the English language, I thought it would be a fun project to tackle anyway.

The first step was to find a translation service that had an API wrapper in Python (my language of choice). I could not find any that I liked so I built one myself.

To build the API wrapper, I first checked to see what results the Google Translate API would give me and what the API needs to fulfil my request. From there, I wrote the...

There are a group of Hacker Schoolers working on the SICP book and today is the first forum. I was scheduled to present for SICP exercise 1.5 but because of my poor dental health (root canals, the horror!!!), I would not be able to attend the first meeting so I’m writing about the solution here instead.

The problem statement is as follows:

Exercise 1.5. Ben Bitdiddle has invented a test to determine whether the
interpreter he is faced with is using applicative-order evaluation or normal
order evaluation. He defines the following two procedures:

(define (p) (p))

(define (test x y)
(if (= x 0)
0
y))

Then he evaluates the expression

(test 0 (p))

What behavior will Ben observe with an interpreter that uses
applicative-order evaluation? What behavior will he observe with an
interpreter that uses normal-order evaluation? Explain your answer.
(Assume that the evaluation rule for the...

Hacker School is an experiment and I am 5 weeks into it. I’ve written code I want to write for myself, had the opportunity to listen to many educational talks, and met a countless number of impressive and amazing people.

I can confidently say that I enjoy and learn from everything I do at Hacker School. But perhaps the single most beneficial thing I have been doing at Hacker School is pair programming. I’ve paired with a lot of people on schemepy, and with Susan Steinman and Tom Ballinger on a new bpython enhancement. From just these two projects alone I’ve learned so much about interpreters, environments, and Python in a fraction of the time it would have taken to figure things out on my own.

Because this is a post about pair programming, we decided to pair blog about our adventures.

Susan (the amanuensis): Steph has a much stronger background in Python than I do, so at first I was...