 Renzo what's up? What's up Renzo? Just joining the nice growl. Ah you must have asked your own questions I'm sure. Hey Marcus. Hey Joviay. Excellent everybody's here. Let's get this party started then. So I'm going to be asking questions to Marcus and Jordan's going to be asking questions to Joviay although I get a feeling that that might end up being mixed up around but I'm sure we'll all have fun while we're doing this. All right so I'll start with an ice breaker for Marcus. So is there something interesting or curious on the desk around you that you'd like to share? I brought my lucky pick. Nice. Yeah it helped me get through those 10 years of being on the trading desk and working on it. You tend to get superstitious when you do those kind of things and yeah it's still with me and brings me luck. Excellent thank you. Jordan. Okay and I would like to have you first clarify exactly how to pronounce your name, Toviay is that? I think you've got it basically right it's seven hard four people in my country to pronounce but I pronounce it Toviay. Okay Toviay say my ice breaker question to you. Is there something around you or in your surroundings you'd like to share? Any fun facts about you you'd like to share? Not in my surroundings but a fun fact about me is I do like to do some gardening when I'm not coding. Yes. What's your favorite thing to garden? Physically make a lawn and clear out the weeds. Yeah very cathartic. You can come around to my house if you want. Excellent. Okay let's have the first question for Marcus. So CLJ tells I think this is a wonderful project I'm just curious about what your inspiration for creating it is you've mentioned kind of breaking that crack into how lecturers teach physics was that one of the things that drove you there? Yeah exactly so I started with learning general relativity and there is this wonderful book functional differential geometry right so to show it from Gerald Sussman and Jack Wisdom and I started to learn it and had to install emacs and all those tooling and I thought well that takes quite a while especially on windows machines five years ago it was even more difficult and so I thought well it takes quite a while to someone can start really to learn the physics part of it and I thought well there needs to be something done about it to get physicists more into this kind of understanding their own subject and as I said in the talk it's very understandable that scientists they don't pick up tools very easily that are not known to them because they have their tools and are used to them and know how to use them and so it needs to be made easy not only simple but easy and that's really what I was up to when starting with this project right. Excellent thank you. All right and I just want to remind everybody in the audience there are several ways to get your questions on the docket we'd prefer that you just raise your hand in zoom and then you can ask your question directly or you can put it in the discord channel or you can write it in the zoom chat. Okay so next question for Tovye so kind of same thing what what inspired you to get into all of this where were you exposed to sick p or sick m first? Well the inspiration is I did my undergraduate in mechanical engineering so I had some exposure to physics I've not read the sick p book I've started reading the sick m book and because of my exposure to physics I'm interested in math and physics equations I watch maybe youtube videos where I see equations and sometimes I would like to play around with these and when I saw the s i c m utils library inclusion since I'm also interested in inclusion I thought this was a good intersection of interests I could get to analyze these equations right from within inclusion and also another factor is there are a few closure developers here in Nigeria so I joined I looked for online communities to join and there was the s c m utils community so that got me going meeting other closureists and discussing the book and when the suggestion came about to give a talk at this conference I was happy to get involved. Oh wonderful good to hear from you so back to John with Marcus. Yes thank you so there is a question from discord from Jacob he's asking if you've actually tried the puzzles approach with any of the students yet and if so how did it go? Yeah that's the lakmus test and that's still missing so the answer is no but I tried so there is I'm based in Vienna which is not in Australia no kangaroos here and there is an institute for the physics for for teaching physics the tactics of physics and I went there and showed them my project and they were very helpful and friendly but the thing is they said well we are only doing grammar school level so your project is very very nice and everything but still we don't have students for you to try it out you would need to lower the level of your content and then it would be possible but I'm not really sure if I want to go down that road and on the other hand I talked to university people and they said well we have Mathematica here so we are teaching with Mathematica and I said well yeah it's open source and everything I say yeah that's that's the same the same point all over again they have their tools and they work and so answer is no I tried I will I will take any chance I can get but you know the tool is there it's there for a reason and maybe there is my lucky pick and I still got this far right so the next talk is by Gerald Sassmann I never thought I'm going to get this far with my project which is something and I'm still knocking on wood that someday someone will come up and say yeah I'll try to show this to my students but didn't happen yet yes well I I'm with you with the pig I wish you all the success in that range and yeah a lot of people are you learning a lot more outside of university now so maybe there's like a community that will pick that up outside of university as well and the thing is thing is obviously I have some friends from from my physics study in days they are at university and and even their students mostly learn mechanics the usual Newtonian way and until they come to this Lagrangian way I'm that's that takes some time and and so that's that's another another issue that it is it is a way of of teaching I mean I'm all in for it right and then I'm sure many many are but finding students is well yeah but but that's why I'm here actually to present yes and let's hope all many of us students get a chance to come see this video and see what they're missing out on thank you okay another one for Tove here so it sounds like you are familiar with Sam Richie and his work he's done porting SICM to closure script how how much have you worked with him to what extent well the mostly so far the extent I've worked with him is consuming his work well I'm starting to get more involved for example the SICM Utils group I mentioned earlier we met several times earlier this year to discuss the book and the library and Sam was at those meetings and of recent I've taken a closer look at the library not just consuming it and doing the exercises for and the book but with a view to contributing as well so I hope to maybe get a PR match into the library soon and make other more significant contributions yeah yeah Sam is a great guy and he'll probably really appreciate that he loves to work with the community okay back to John and Marcus okay um so I'm quite curious how you actually built CLJ tiles or any particular libraries and tools that helped you build this project well I mean there is of course the closure script part of the SICM library by Sam Richie and Colin Smith did the closure initially closure version so that's without the port to closure script the whole project would need to run on a server obviously and that's not necessary so that was a precondition to be able to deliver something like this and then there is the Blockly library which is maintained by Google so these are this it's basically a connection of those two everything else is reagent standard closure script front and stuff and as far as I can remember nothing really more yeah and the rendering of the evaluation results that's quite nice is that some kind of math library ah yes yes that's math checks um but the but the the tech that that's actually that's a really low hanging fruit because the SICM library has all the all the tech technology built into it so it's just there was nothing to do for me to get all this this nice results and output it was already there I just had to plug it together so yeah it's it's it's just really really it fits really it had to be done it just had to be done in my opinion yeah wonderful thank you very much so I'm actually going to let I think this was a question from you John so I will let you ask about the uh the use of clerk to Tovye oh yes yes I did like I noticed you were using clerk in there I just wondered um yeah what the learning experience was with with clerk was it something that was new to you when you started or did you were already familiar with it using I was new to clerk I had seen the presentations on other reclusion conference so I was it was on my reader and it was basically a choice between notespace and clerk since I am working with uh windows wsl on windows windows subsystem for Linux so I think for some reason uh clerk performed better there so I chose clerk and uh but once I picked clerk there were no problems it was very easy to get it going and get it working excellent thank you you can go ahead and ask a question to Marcus now too I guess putting all the work on John oh making me work oh it's it's getting late so yes uh what do we got next oh um um yeah I was quite interested in the error handling stuff as all that looks very friendly and that's one obviously one of the aspects of closure that people like pick up on us there's not being that useful um is that quite was that quite easy to create is like is that kind of extensive yes yeah the next the next thing is I forgot the of course of course it's it's the Babashka SCI so the Babashka for closure script by by Mikhail Bork and which of course I mean don't have to mention uh everyone knows him um and without that uh I wouldn't have those error messages it's it's uh it would I think it would have been much harder to implement all this thing with uh self-hosted closure script so the SCI interpreter again uh delivers on that for free for me so it's it's again another another stone helping me there uh without without any effort from my side yes I what I what I'd like to mention if you have time that the thing is uh the the uh evaluation is is not not a rep like evaluation so it's more like a print like debug so the the program runs through every time you you do an inspection and get the narrow message and uh yes SCI does it very nicely excellent thank you very much looks like we have a hand raised here mr egg mr egg davis let's make sure he can unmute himself cool yeah um so question for marcus uh I'm not familiar with Lagrangian mechanics so it's possible my question is completely incoherent um but I think that uh when you made the distinction of of the function l that's the Lagrangian function yes yes yes um and so the um uh you talked about there being an issue there uh where that was sort of distinguished from ordinary functions right the ordinary function tiles uh where the function could not be removed from the function ls where it could do I am I do I have that correct yes I mean what you're referring to is I think is that the usual way in clj tiles you define functions is uh is in a way where where the first part of of this definition cannot be removed and only the arguments can be removed from that block and this is for convenience reasons for the physicists who are familiar with with this kind of notation um and and it it kind of contradicts the list tradition and what I wanted to say in the talk is that I'm deliberately breaking the list tradition in order to make it easier for scientists to slip into it but for doing higher order functions you actually need something that is more in the list tradition so I introduced another concept for higher order functions whereas in the list language everything is one concept you don't make a distinction between calling a function it's all hidden data it's all one data's code is data right and in in clj tiles I break with this code is data paradigm in order for for having this simpler expressions having displayed in a more visually appealing way and in my in my opinion more easier way to read them so it's it's only a well not only that the purpose of clj tiles is to make things easier to read and and that's why I had or I chose to break the list tradition for simple function calls I hope that answers your question there's nothing to do with Lagrangians really or physics at all it's just how I distinguish between function calls and calls of higher order functions totally if I'm if I'm not taking up too much time here organizers please feel free to cut me off but that was all sort of the lead up to my actual question which was um that makes sense uh but it seems like it does also sort of open space for user error since they can remove that function and leave themselves in a you know a state that can't run and what I'm curious about is whether giving functions or expressions whether there's the possibility to use a different puzzle connector shape to distinguish those to prevent that user error or got something you've taken a look at ah okay well no no I've the the idea is that that you have puzzles and connect them and you can do whatever you like and and there is no no prevention of for people to make errors they they should make errors they can start all over it's not for developing really it's really for playing with puzzles and understanding physics there would be the possibility to kind of implement guard rails and things like that and I started with about that I didn't figure out how to there are so many combinations what to prevent and how to do it so I don't think I can ever find a solution to that and I'm not so sure if that's really necessary to to implement those guard rails another thing is if I have time there is uh in the in the usual Parsons puzzle in computer science you usually have a success message right you you get a star or whatever yeah you did it right in in clj tiles that's not the case you just do whatever you like with the puzzles and and look at the and look at the result and there is there is no way in this in this kind of high level physics area I there is no way around grabbing the book reading it and and and understanding what's going on I don't think maybe well I I don't know how to how to prevent errors in this kind of realm so to say so short answer no whatever you like thank you egg thank you and so we are going to a question from discord for tovie having always resisted my colleagues automatic matlab and python recommendations what is the comparison of capabilities available in sicm utils well I'm not in a position to make a comparison the extent of my use of matlab is for plotting graphs so I've not used it for differentiating functions or solving equations and I've not really made use of python for solving equations as well I I made that statement mainly to point out that it is possible to do some of these operations within closure so perhaps you are working at closure for most of the day and you see this interesting equation now there's no need to context switch you can just pull in pull in a closure library and continue your exploration from there I'm sure matlab and yeah maybe there's other python tools that have many years to have built up a lot of functionality that the sicm utils library does not have right now but with time and more community effort I'm sure we'll catch up and add all of those features to the sicm utils library as well yeah yeah that makes sense I'm going to ask you one more question to ova so you said that the closure community is lacking there in Nigeria I'd love to hear what initially attracted you to closure and list languages and what peaked your interest well I started programming somewhere around 2017 and as a new programmer I thought this could be easier there was a lot of stuff to learn and somewhere along the line I came across richikis talk about simple made easy I didn't really understand what he was talking about but what hooked me in was the simple part so at least someone was finally talking about how to make programming simpler now I understand that it's actually about not entangling all the parts of your program so that got me interested and about a few years ago I started trying to learn closure seriously and dig into it and about two years ago also I finally got a job working in closure so since then I've been continuing with closure great thanks so much for that response and over to you John thank you very much Jordan and yeah so I'm kind of curious Marcus if there are any features you still hope to add to clj tiles or if you're looking for pull requests and you kind of mentioned it it might be quite challenging to add like different concepts outside of sicm is can you give us some idea about what would actually be involved in that well as I tried to explain before that the most time spent on this project was for coming up with the example there are 137 puzzles in there so I couldn't I couldn't show them all yeah so I put I put most of the effort was figuring out the puzzles with with books from from getting closure from Russ Olsen I took the first chapter and tried to make puzzles out of it or closure for brave and true and then there was then I did some web programming as well and then going on to higher order functions and then in the last 40 puzzles or so it was really the the hard color branch and physics stuff so it's building up and and really meant to to be that that any anyone can can wants to learn closure can make the first hundred puzzles and learn closure and maybe omit the last forty ones and and for the physicists they can go on and make the last so the next steps wouldn't wouldn't be the technical advancements in the whole stack or something or or closure related it would be really making more content and and and refining the puzzles and and and looking at the the tactical side of things but technically at the at the moment I don't I don't have any we had before we had the discussions that maybe you can add guard rails and I thought about you know you have this this this kind of gamification things you very very good points when you do things right and so on and and and and some of my colleagues say yeah here to make it more popular just to do some gamification which which which I think is is more called school if it should be it's not my notion it's not it's a schoolification is in my point of view and I don't want to do the schoolification really because I think people should be free to do whatever they like with the with the package or the project and so technically I can't come up with with something which makes sense from from a from a the tactical point of view but whoever has has has some idea where there are as I said there are lots of ideas but they need to be crisp and bring things really forward and not not just not just looking what what's what's what's going on in the in the in the games industry and then then copying that because that there are lots of issues there as well so yeah no and so there should be just more puzzles and then go more content and and maybe maybe something easier I'm taking too much time but maybe something easier for the grammar school thing that I'm talking to a friend of his a teacher of physics and maybe we can do something there so in in that in that space I would progress and there was Edward did mention in the discord Q&A chat that he would be a willing volunteer as a student to kind of give you some feedback on that as well so oh man that's that's that's so nice that's really nice yeah that's good yeah you're much appreciated thank you so obviously the peggy's working I hope for sure it does no doubt about that excellent stuff well thank you very much uh and I think we're out of time for questions now where it's nicely wrapped up on time thank you