Me, A GoNut?

It's early, and I don't know how far I can take this, but I'm looking at Go, the relatively new programming language developed at Google in 2007.

It resembles C, a lot. C was great for its time, and still is in some ways, but according to me it's hard to read and fussy to write. It also has a lot of issues like dealing manually with memory management, using zero-based arrays, and allowing easy access to unassigned memory, all of with cause endless problems.

Not to mention the critical difference between "=" and "==", which is a major flaw in the design of that language. Even people who have been programming in C for decades still absent-mindedly mistype this, and have to end up hunting down the obscure bugs that come of it. Other languages do this better.

But that's a thing. Only a thing. Not the only thing.

Go has some advantages. I'm early in my exploration and don't really have a lot to say except that I'm hopeful, mainly based on a couple of things I've seen early on.

One is the "gofmt" tool, which rewrites code into go's standard format. It's a "pretty printer", but with a vengeance. It does an end run around brain-fogging arguments about what is the right way to format code. With gofmt, you don't have to think about how far to indent code, or whether to use spaces or tabs, or which line to put the next brace on, because gofmt knows best, and its mind cannot be changed.

Pretty nice.

Another item is "fix" command, which updates packages to use new APIs. In other words, if you have a program written in Go, version X, and the current is Go, version Y, then you can us fix to update your code, or at least mostly. I guess the idea is that it does the most common, ordinary, and routine parts and leaves only the really tricky bits for manual updating.

Having done some programming in Ruby on Rails, I can say that I'm hopefully looking to having a tool to automate at least most of the update process. Ruby on Rails is tremendous in a lot of ways, but being notified by your hosting company that you must update your application, and then trying to hunt down all the little fiddly parts and packages and get them all re-wired again, after what may have been months or years without touching any of that, well, it's a bitch.

One reason that I'm playing with Go is the horribly convoluted swarm of pieces that is the Ruby on Rails environment. It's maddening. And then they have new things to simulate static typing, which is just there if you're using a statically-typed language to start with.

Yeah, so I'm hoping to Go with it then, become a GoNut. We all need something to shoot for, don't we?

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Just about said it all, at least for now.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Getting To The Point In Six

"In the end, everything simply began." Ali Smith wrote that. It's his six word story. Its meaning is left as an exercise for the reader. As they say.

Go figure. Return. We'll talk then.

If you haven't heard yet, all of this is said to have started with Ernest Heminqway, when challenged to write a story in only six words. He did. It's good. Look it up.

Jim Lyon: "Walking home, she regained her virginity."

Yehuda Berlinger: "Found the bouquet in the garbage."

Gregory Maguire: "Commas, see, add, like, nada, okay?"

Alan Moore: "Machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time"

Steven Meretzky: "Steve ignores editor's word limit and"

Get the picture yet?

A few years ago I found a small web site called "Six Word Stories" where these are being collected. There is more than one of these sites, but the quality here is good. Try it. Still there, for now.

Ocean Master: "Mime trapped in box. Irony lost."

Jkypoo: "Fell asleep smoking. Woke up homeless."

Or search for the others.

Or make your own.

 

References:
Six Word Stories
alt link

To cut a long story short
alt link

Caterina Fake

Fifty Original Six Word Stories, by Yehuda Berlinger
alt link

Wired: Very Short Stories - 33 writers. 5 designers. 6-word science fiction.
alt link

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Still counting my toes. Endless fun.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Still Not Sure

Still not sure.

Let alone the question of what I might do if or when I pick up programming again. Let alone the question of why I'm doing this. Why.

"Why" is a question I can at least fake an answer to. I need something to engage my mind and give me a reason to keep breathing. I don't need the money. I have money. I'm OK there. But once you get to a place where you don't need to do anything, you find out that you still need to do it — anything. You need something.

And maybe I'll resharpen and refine my skills and then do something worthwhile. (Maybe!) And maybe not, but I'll have things do learn and to do, which all of us need.

I guess the rule is that when you get old enough you pick a project that you can't possibly finish in your lifetime, and then you're set. You stop worrying, because there is always something that needs to be done and it's right there. You chose it. It's waiting, always waiting, and you either get back to it and work on it or you do nothing.

Doing nothing is not an option. Humans can't do that.

Take the discussion about whether people with income supplements will suddenly turn lazy, watch TV all day, and do nothing else but eat snacks and drink beer. Maybe.

We have a couple of good examples to go by here.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, taking alternating turns as the world's richest person. Bezos in particular. He's so lazy that he's had to hire hundreds of thousands of people to do his work for him. Similarly with Musk, though his work is less labor-intensive. He doesn't need to hire so many. He focuses on the smartest ones, but still needs lots of them.

Right then. Lazy like that.

I have the luxury of deciding what I want to do with the rest of my life, but the need to do something. Just like Jeff and Elon. Jeff, Elon, and Dave — buddies in adventure. All desperate to find meaning in life. That's where I am.

They say that the language you first used to learn programming colors your attitude on which languages are right to use ever after. I learned Pascal.

Lately I've looked into Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, and Ada. All good languages, all gone sideways. In some cases there are decent and modern environments available, on Windows. But mostly not even there. We're talking niche products for special purposes, especially with Ada and Pascal.

They're used some places, for some purposes, but not even those are fully-rounded, full-usable, up to date tools.

Clojure looks interesting but is closely tied to the Java environment. Racket is supposedly good though it looks goofy. Do I need to learn a whole new, confusing, convoluted syntax? Probably not.

So I'll take a serious look at Python, start learning it soon. Probably the closest to the sort of language I feel comfortable with. Seems to have all the tools. Seems to be easy to install and begin using, unlike Ruby/Ruby on Rails. The latter is fine and fun and I like it, but hellish to install and keep updated, especially for use with an environment like Heroku, which is a separate full-time job in itself.

Maybe Python will work.

I've got nothing to lose anyway, do I?

 

---

Have extra info to add?
If the commenting system is out again, then email sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Wondering, always wondering.

Racket? Which?

Been reading "Racket Programming the Fun Way: From Strings to Turing Machines", by by James W. Stelly, but it isn't fun.

Wanted to find out what this whole Lisp family of languages is about. Maybe get into functional programming. Get earnest. Get different. Get more real.

So far it's been a bunch of confusing syntax that looks unnecessarily, complicatedly fussy.

Wondering if it's going to be worth it. Maybe I'll end up learning a little Emacs Lisp, enough so that I can diddle my emacs setup as needed, when needed, and go on to Python. Just join the mainstream.