Something is wrong.
I don’t think it is the outside temperature or the inside. Not the sheets, the pillow (cases), or my health in general, but I’ve had a hard time falling asleep recently (past week?). I end up with an irritated, scratchy, dry throat and end up coughing for a long time as I lay there in bed, regardless of position, time of night, how much I’ve had to eat or drink, etc. But when I wake up in the morning I’m fine.
This is, however, annoying. My throat hurts.
From a Slashdotabout Ruby and Lisp:
Because you’ll end up at Lisp.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14, @09:38AM
What most people don’t realize is that Lisp is the inherent representation of virtually all programming languages. This is even true for languages like C, Java, Smalltalk, and Ruby. We can plainly see this by the very fact that basically every compiler or interpreter for those languages parses the language into an abstract syntax tree. And that’s exactly what Lisp is: a textual representation of an AST. It is so powerful because it directly allows the programmer to access and modify what amounts to the AST of his or her program. This is something that a language like C isolates to the compiler, or at best the preprocessor.What fewer people realize is that Smalltalk is Lisp with a slightly different syntax. The concepts are basically identical, however. So suppose the Ruby developers do all the hard work needed to switch their language over to a Smalltalk-like syntax. Do you know what will happen next? They’ll ask themselves what could be improved next. And the first thing that’ll happen is a consideration of making the syntax and semantics of the language more Lisp-like. And that’s just because Lisp represents the most inherent aspects of what a programming language is.
I have my copy of The Little Schemer (updated version of The Little Lisper basically) around here but never plowed all the way through it (Scheme being a Lisp dialect more or less), and I know that as a linguistics-inclined computer geek that Lisp and such should be just “my thing”tm. Hell, anyone who really knows my writing knows that I love parentheses … I would be right at home with Lisp.
Ruby is another matter. After reading Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby you’ll want to try Ruby, too.
There is this anal part of me that just wants to spend his days organizing data … documents, facts, relationships … whatever comes to me. I see an interesting set of data or facts and want to write an SQL database for it. This is probably a sign of an unhealthy mind.
Finally we have a little snow in the new year … hope it lasts.
