Minecraft and Java

Posted on

My 6-year-old son has been playing Minecraft a lot lately and now he wants to start making mods. So, I am learning more about Java, so I can help him learn a little bit about programming. In order to make mods, it looks like you need to use MinecraftForge.

In the process of learning more about Java (which is a language I've never really been interested in learning), I stumbled upon an interesting project at Google that essentially compiles Java to JavaScript: GWT

JetBrains also has a nice IDE for Java, called IntelliJ IDEA

StackEdit

Posted on

This year, I moved to yet another note-taking application. This one is the best thus far. It's web-based and has MarkDown and LaTeX support: StackEdit

Differentiable programming and Julia

Posted on

Thanks to LinkedIn and Miguel Aragon-Calvo, I learned a bit about differentiable programming today (also see this explanation). In the process, I found out about a framework in the Julia programming language, called Zygote, which enables differentiable programming. I have been waiting for a reason to learn more about Julia. This may be it!

This also serves as motivation.

Visual Studio Code

A graduate student who I was recently working with (mentoring) installed Visual Studio Code to improve his software development workflow in Python. VSCode looked different than when I last checked it out, so installed it on my workstation to re-evaluate it. The software has improved significantly since I first tried it out four years ago! It's nearly as good as PyCharm for Python and it has extensions for many languages, including Julia, Rust, and x86-64 assembly, OpenCL, and Vulkan. It may actually be the best IDE for Vulkan and Rust at the moment, though IntelliJ Rust may eventually supercede it. For Julia, Juno seems to be the best at the moment, but VSCode is likely a strong second option. I doubt that it can compete with QtCreator or CLion as a C++ IDE (that's what the regular, non-free Visual Studio IDE is for…but it's not available for GNU/Linux, so who cares!).