I realized during the first week of classes this week that I will be programming more this semester than I ever have in my life. For some reason I have decided to punish myself by choosing 4 classes that each require me to program in a different language. Here's a breakdown of the classes and the programming projects required for them:

  1. Computational Linguistics: This is one of the courses for my minor in Cognitive Science. For this one, I'll be working on various programming projects in Perl (and learning Perl in the process).
  2. Computer Vision: Another minor class. This one will be a bunch of projects in Matlab, which I have also never used.
  3. Quantitative Research: This one is a research-related class. It also turns out I have to learn linear algebra for this one. Fortunately, if the book for the class doesn't teach me everything I need, I've always got the Khan Academy to help me out. The final project for this is to write a program to play Goofspiel. The grade for the final will depend on how well your program performs in a round-robin tournament with the other students' programs. Anyway, this one has to be in C++, the third and hopefully final new programming language for me this semester.
  4. Software Design and Integration: This is another class that I'm required to take for the program. It's primarily about design patterns, so hopefully it will make me a more awesome programmer. It also requires me to work with a group to write a program using the patterns we learn in class. The language for this is not specified, but I imagine it will probably be either Java or Python. I'll just have to wait and see what my as yet undetermined group members select.

I'm definitely looking forward to this semester. Some may wonder why I'm doing so much program in my IS Ph.D. program, but I really like it. I enjoy programming, and it is something that I really want to be better at. I will definitely be pushed, probably be stressed, but I will certainly be more awesome at the end of this semester than I was at the beginning.