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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

Rare piece of Kent content on HN! I went to the University of Canterbury, and there's a beautiful walk all the way from Canterbury to Whitstable - absolutely lovely part of the world. Canterbury is a slightly smaller version of other cathedral cities like Cambridge or Oxford and while the university isn't as highly rated (and was mostly architected in the 60s by a guy who also designed prisons), the Computer Science department is really good, especially the coverage of functional programming.

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There's a beautiful walk between Folkestone and Dover that somehow even people who live in Kent aren't aware of. It's especially good for geeky types as there is some lovely infrastructure to see and learn about. The railway snakes along the coastline, weaving in and out of the cliffs. You can walk below the railway or up on the cliff above it. There are signs of early attempts at a channel tunnel from the 1800s and, of course, the real channel tunnel. In particular Samphire Hoe which was created using the earth removed from the tunnel and now houses ventilation fans for the tunnel.

The Crab and Winkle Way - I cycled it last week.

You pass the Tyler Hill Tunnel which is the oldest rail tunnel in the world: https://crabandwinkle.org/visiting-the-tyler-hill-tunnel-at-...

Canterbury is a slightly smaller version of other cathedral cities like Cambridge or Oxford

Fellow Canterbury fan here, and this might even be underselling it to people unaware of British history. Canterbury is physically smaller for sure, but significantly outranks OxCam in terms of historical and ecclesiastical value; its cathedral being the mother church of the entire Anglican communion.

> cathedral cities like Cambridge or Oxford

Oxford cathedral is actually the college chapel of Christ Church, a college of Oxford University. It's not open to the public. You need a letter from your anglican parish priest confirming that you are a church member if you want to visit.

It's not even a landmark; the chapel is inside the college walls, and barely visible from the street. The striking tower over Christ Church (Tom Tower) is over the college gatehouse, and not part of the chapel.

Tom Tower, by the way, is named for Great Tom, the bell that chimes the hours. It used to chime local time, which in Oxford is nine minutes behind UTC. Nowadays it chimes UTC hours (formerly GMT).

And Cambridge doesn't have a cathedral. That would be in Ely, though Great St Mary's is a big church.

I suppose I’m guilty of conflating dreaming spires and river punts with Anglican dioceses, I just didn’t want prospective students to rock up on an open day disappointed. :)

I think the best "dreaming spire" is the spire of St. Mary's Church, billed as the University Church. There's a spiral staircase up the inside of the spire, made of very worn stone, and a narrow viewing platform around the top, from which you can look down and see the layout of the quads of several of the most-famous colleges. And you can rub noses with a couple of gargoyles.

Not as big as King's Chapel over the road though!

Fellow Kent alumni here! The CS department also has (or had?) the lecturer who wrote the textbook and IDE for most "Intro to OOP" courses, which was cool.

It's like a UKC reunion in here! Lived in Whitstable for the last two years of my degree course, quite often went out on the spit.

I also want to UKC and I lived in Whitstable for my 2nd year in 1974.

Piling in on the UKC reunion.

Studied Computer Systems Engineering from 2003 - 2007. Always looked forward to Winston Waller's lectures, which typically involved regailing us of control systems he built for various breweries.

Not sure why this got so heavily downvoted, let people reminisce.

I studied Physics & Computing, so didn't have a lot of interaction with the Computing Lab specifically, though I recall Ian Utting and Bob Eager:

https://www.kent.ac.uk/computing/people/3094/utting-ian

https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/unikentcomp-news/2015/12/18/farewel...

BlueJ, David Barnes, and Michael Kölling?

Yep!

Yet another alumni. UKC also had the lecturer who wrote the text book for functional programming - Simon Thompson - Haskell The Craft of Functional Programming (I think!). It was used at other unis including Durham.

Incidentally, I now live nearer to Holy Island with it's disappearing causeway, which is mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Would definitely recommend a visit as it can be stunning in the right weather.

Is that you Chris? I think I did a CS poster project with you.

I lived in London for 4 years and this walk was my wife and I's favorite. We always took visitors to do it. Really beautiful and from an outsider's perspective feels very "British" :)

UKC was, I seem to remember the main academic gateway to the internet in the late 80s early 90s - did groundbreaking work.

That's funny. I went for an open day in the UK Computer Science dept in 1999. It was an exciting department but one of the things that put me off was the internet was so slow in the lab it was almost unusable. Perhaps they were having a bad day...

UKC was on Janet so it shouldn’t have been so terrible compared to other institutions. One of the biggest issues back then was people running remote X sessions on shared departmental machines so everything would grind to a halt at the start of lessons (unless you knew how to use Blackbox etc). And all the best machines were reserved for multimedia students.

Late 1990's Comp Sci department?

A whole slew of people would have been getting great speeds from a dedicated fibre link or two .. just not the open day labs.

First rule of bandwidth club.

Certainly in the 90s through HENSA and the UK Mirror Service it was responsible for hosting huge amounts of useful software. I always chose mirror.ac.uk as my mirror in Debian for sentimental reasons.

I'm from Kent, and it's nice to see a familiar name! Normally it's Rochester...New York :)

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