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Summer Internships - The Good, and the Bad?
loquacious d asks: "This has been a spectacular summer for open-source student internships. Google funded a huge variety of open-source projects through the Summer of Code, including GCC-CIL and other improvements to Mono, new features and fixes for Gaim, and even new packages for Common Lisp. Joel Spolsky at Fog Creek hired four interns to produce a highly modified version of VNC called Fog Creek Copilot, and Paul Graham's new venture capital firm Y Combinator helped students create their own tech companies. What internships did people enjoy this summer, and which ones didn't work out so well? Which ones would you recommend to next year's applicants, and which should they avoid?"
Common Lisp has been attracting a lot of attention lately, compared to previous activity. Several of the Common Lisp projects funded were for the purpose of improving things like foreign function interfaces, and thus speed Lisp's popularity and utility even further.
There are a lot of applications written in Lisp that are special enough and powerful enough to justify lots of attention. For example:
ACL2 : http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/
This is a high powered proof assistant and IIRC was used by AMD to verify some parts of their chip design.
Maxima: http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
This is a computer algebra system, with the ability to do things like symbolic integration. Not your run of the mill program, and very difficult to do except in a language like lisp or a similar language
Axiom: http://www.axiom-developer.org/
A second computer algebra system, with a slightly different approach than Maxima. Also extremely powerful, and is pushing the envelope of robust, literate program design for computational mathematics.
None of these has a pretty interface, granted (at least not one written in lisp) but these are not your everyday programs. Lisp is a real language in real, non-trivial use.
There are a variety of other projects being undertaken, check out http://common-lisp.net/ for many of them. And if you want to code lisp remember to explore SLIME+Emacs.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Yup tomorrow is my last day as an intern at a pretty large(think largest) financial institute.
I am a CS major, one semester left. Basically I am working with a team of developers and tech support(internal tech support) and my awesome summer internship consisted of waiting around for tech support to write up procedures so I could mark them up in html and post them on some crippled website. I was lucky it let me use css. The job should have taken a week max, but the ones afraid to lose their jobs by publishing their tasks streched it out to 10 weeks. About 3 weeks in I approached my manager(very hands off type of guy) and told him of the situation and asked if I could work with the developers in my many downtime hours.
Scheduled a meeting...
"Hey website looks great, content is key, make sure we get those procedures up"...walks away.
So I took it upon myself to offer my services to the developers, well, the project is so far ahead of schedule, the developers have no work for even themselves.
So, I waited out the summer, and tried to learn about my favorite new technologies, even started do top coder competitions during work.
And for those saying get research experience, i've also had bad luck with that. Pretty much since sophomore year, I have offered my time, for free, to every professor in my department. No interest. I applied to every REU site listed, got accepted by colorado, then rejected 3 days later.
Its not as easy as you people make it out to be.