Geekstorming

I just killed a couple of days reading Stevey’s Drunken Blog Rants, which is a fascinating account of a talented engineer spending a year searching for better languages, and finding Lisp in the end. Lots of interesting insights — I found his essays on practicing programming and math every day to be particularly inspiring, since I’ve already found Lisp, and Ruby, and OCaml, and Erlang, and pretty much all of the other languages that are mentioned. Except Rebol. That one was new.

I’ve resolved to read more of the CompSci books that, for no good reason, I haven’t gotten around to reading. I think I’ve somehow tricked myself into thinking that because Christophe de Dinechin hasn’t written a book about Concept Programming, that there are no books out there that have ideas worth thinking about. Obviously this is fallacious. Just because I might consider the idea that everything is an object to be — and I’m quoting here from Czarnecki and Eisenecker’s Generative Programming — “profane”, doesn’t mean I have any excuse for not having read Design Patterns. Hell, it’s not as if that’s stopped me from toying with Smalltalk. If you’ve got any great CS books to recommend, please do so in the comments!

I just rediscovered an excellent post about Forth and abstraction, sitting in draft form, from last June. I’m going to go clean that one up and post it.