PLMW is calling for student applications -- if you are a student interested in ICFP/SPLASH 2025, consider applying!

Deadline: July 15, AoE

conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-sp...

Bleak state of peer review (a minor thing, in the grand scheme of things, but anyway) -- getting a message saying "please don't use AI tools to write your reviews".

Here’s a question: if we believe reading code is as important as writing code (we do), why isn’t it a much more explicit part of our introductory classes? Students read examples, but not whole projects, and writing about / critiquing code is not typically an _explicit_ task. Unless others do this?

Winter break reading—wonderful book about a brief period when CUNY opened up to all NYC high school graduates (made it free, had explicit programs for people without strong backgrounds, etc), told through the teaching of four incredibly influential writers who all overlapped at City College.

Thought experiment: what if we _did_ teach intro CS with LLMs from the very beginning? Conventional wisdom is that this is a bad idea (students need to learn fundamentals, and LLMs can stand in for this), but I wonder if this is because we are thinking about it wrong.

There's a strange take I keep seeing that AI is not only bad (environmentally, stealing work, &c), but that its useless. That seems v. strange, since while its certainly being hyped, it also obviously has huge automating power. Being anti-automation is one thing, but odd to pretend it doesn't exist?

People claim Python (the language) is beginner friendly... I just spent 10 minutes figuring out a bug that turned out to be an accidental trailing comma on a line. On its own (one character!), turns a value into a tuple with the value inside!

Found a new clever dark pattern. Click unsubscribe link (I know I know), brings up five radio button options, “stay subscribed” is top one, selected. Clicking on the _text_ of the bottom one (unsubscribe) selects the next one up instead (pause for 90 days). You have to click the actual radio button…

Nice to have a bank training people to fall for scams, while pretending to help against them (assuming this _is_ legit…)