Tutorial

HOW-TO: Create a MATLAB Virtual Machine

A steadily-increasing number of students and postdocs in our group find themselves needing to run huge numbers of model simulations, and the path of least resistance — using their local desktop or laptop — simply isn't feasible. Thankfully we have the Nectar Cloud at our disposal! I've been helping several people in our group transition to this platform, and this has prompted me to prepare several step-by-step tutorial for the different needs I've encountered so far. It's my intention to make these all available online, and the first cab off the rank is: How to create a MATLAB VM.

Live coding, Emacs, and ghci

This semester I'm co-lecturing Declarative Programming (COMP90048). The topics I'll be covering include monads, laziness, performance, and type system expressiveness, with Haskell as our language of choice. This will be the first time that I'll try live coding in front of students, because I've previously lectured non-programming subjects such as multi-variable calculus and infectious disease modelling.

The obvious choice of tool for live demonstrations of Haskell code and expression evaluation is ghci. And I happen to have ghci already installed, by virtue of using xmonad to manage my windows and workspaces. I also spend most of my working hours living in Emacs, which has great support for working with interactive programming environments (also referred to as REPLs, Read-Eval-Print Loops) and for taking code blocks from open files and evaluating them in these environments. So I know what my preferred tools are. But it wasn't immediately clear to me what the precise workflow should be.