CompSciSelfLearning

I'm shopping on PC Part Picker and I've been convincing myself to pull the trigger on the following setup.

I have a few 1+TB HDDs for storage and plan to use a SSD to boot Linux. I might occasionally run Windows in a VM for Visual Studio 2019 to to develop a suite of C++ GUI programs. I don't do any gaming. I might stream/record/edit a few video tutorials. I may also crunch some numbers in small to moderately sized databases locally. I do like to open as many browser tabs as possible while I'm coding some useless side projects.

Am I crazy, wrong, or both?

PCPartPicker Part List

I purchased Koss UR40 headphones this week. I plugged them in and I hear a lot of hissing. I tried them on my phone and no hissing, so the issue is not the headphones.

I suspect that the culprit is the cheap Amazon basics USB computer speakers the headphones are plugged into. I'm sure something has to change. My headphones don't reach the back of the computer from where I sit. But I'm not familiar enough to troubleshoot further.

In order to have hiss-free audio:
What steps should I take?
What equipment can I purchase?
Do I need a new soundcard?

About 2 months ago I asked what people were doing with Ocaml. It was great to see the variety of projects people shared. Anyone have updates on your progress?

For those that missed the first post or started on something new, let us know what you're working on.

For those of you enrolled in an accredited degree program, Google Summer of Code 2020 announced the 200 organizations that will be participating as mentors this year.

They begin accepting student applications on Monday, March 16, 2020 at 18:00 UTC and the deadline to apply is Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 18:00 UTC.

What are you doing with Ocaml currently?

I just found out about Incr_dom, so I'm playing with that. I don't know what I'm doing though. I've never even made a website.

So what are you up to?

I've been learning OCaml (pretty much no experience prior). I have seen the term monad mentioned a few times, but I don't have any sense of what a monad is or how it is useful.

A quick search lead me to Wikipedia, which has the following unhelpful description:

In functional programming, a monad is a design pattern that allows structuring programs generically while automating away boilerplate code needed by the program logic. Monads achieve this by providing their own data type, which represents a specific form of computation, along with one procedure to wrap values of any basic type within the monad (yielding a monadic value) and another to compose functions that output monadic value

Some people commenting in a post I can no longer find were indicating that starting with functional programming when first learning is a good idea.

Is this a widely held view?

I see that the FUN-MOOC course, Introduction to Functional Programming in OCaml, is still open for free registration for few more weeks.

Both this OCaml course and How to Design Programs using Racket seem to be highly regarded.

Anyone have feedback on either of these resources for learning? Are these good places to start for someone with no programming experience?

This is such a great command line tool that's quick and simple to use.

Full Stack JavaScript Track | NodeJS

Thank you to anyone that contributed to The Odin Project.

TL;DR Looking for examples of unit-testing in whatever programming language you're familiar with.

I'm reading through How to Design Programs and came across this line:

One day you will switch to another programming language; one of the first tasks will be to figure out its unit-testing framework.

The text gives a clear example of how to set up unit tests using Racket, noting that the check-expect statements can be above or below your function definitions. But when glancing at other frameworks like Python's unittest and doctest, the examples are less clear. Can anyone provide some unit-testing examples in languages other than Racket?

Bonus: how much