Four Times Annoyed
Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 26 Nov 2006 07:59:24 GMT
This last week I got some interesting bad news about my eyes: apparently my pupils over-dilate in darkness or semi-darkness. I have my first old-man disorder at the ripe old age of 25. On long drives at night I will have to turn the dome light on to prevent my eyes from perceiving every light source as a giant luminous splotch with an echo above or below it. This is also why I needed new glasses recently, but why I didn’t notice until I left my job and started working nights. There is no cure for this problem except time; as I age my pupil dilation should get less responsive, which will counteract this problem.
I just finished reading Demian by Hesse. A great book, except for all the cult stuff near the end. There are a number of passages that I really identified with, but the strongest was this:
“Sometimes when I ran through the streets in the evening, unable to return before midnight because I was so restless, I felt that now at this very moment I would have to meet my beloved—as she walked past me at the next street corner, called to me from the nearest window. At other times all of this seemed unbearably painful…”
I was very annoyed that I could identify so thoroughly with a character who goes on to basically endorse Anton LaVey satanism. Tsk-tsk.
I was thinking today about programming in Erlang and how much I enjoy it, but at the same time, though I enjoy my big functional languages, not one of them has a decent Mac library; most of them don’t even have decent Unix GUI libraries or web frameworks. Erlang at least has a promising-sounding web framework but I am tired of web programming for the moment. It’s so very occupational.
I became annoyed thinking about OCaml and how much I had liked it. OCaml is basically the marijuana of functional languages—you start there, and then you get into the heavy stuff like Lisp, Haskell and Erlang. Or else you remain trapped with OCaml, perhaps consuming liters of the Russian vodka of languages—C++—at the same time. “Well, it could be worse.” Yes.
I am disappointed that nobody has anything to say about my quicksort post. I suspect that one is for the ages, and in a couple years, someone will be quite glad it’s there. Nobody pointed out that I am doubling the constant factor in my partition, or that I should use median-of-three for better performance against pre-sorted lists. I expected Lance to show up and demand some merge sorts, which I haven’t coded since my second year of CS.
For myself in response to the Brick Science article, I wrote a small linked list library in C. It turned out to be about 55 lines of code, and it took me about 15 minutes to write, which reassured me after reading that the author expects 155 lines/hour. I would not expect anyone to achieve that in a reasonable language, but with C you can really fluff things up with meaningless brackets and wasted type declarations. Even Lisp, which is the most text-liberal functional language, is a factor of two or three improvement over C. I remember days at Clearwired where I was productively producing about 10 or 20 lines of Python an hour. Of course, HTML is a bit cheaper.
I have become a real dick about movies. Elitism is the opiate of the Dan, but I have tried to be conservative about which things I am an elitist about: heavy metal, programming languages and religion being the primary fields, but also somewhat about politics. I have more-or-less ejected politics as a synonym for theft, graft, stupidity, and waste, no matter the incarnation, so into the open slot I have tossed movies. My brother hasn’t helped, we have been alternating classics I have loved for some time with known-good classics of his interest, and both learning a lot. Plus now we have a lot of pretentious hatred for new movies. It’s a perfect fit with the rest of our hatred set (music and television).
I am now going to attempt to read another classic book, since I usually read about four non-programming books a year and Demian is number one for 2006.
