Fuji XT-4 | 35mm ƒ/1.4
dusting off the old scrolls
a seed was planted by a certain professor Clark some years ago, who held his sword of Common Lisp aloft as if it was he that pull’d it from the stone. armed with thin clients and a bucket full of parenthesis, he led a brave charge attempting to teach the merits of homoiconicity and metaprogramming to a class full of what could only be described as children. this, of course, could not have possibly been expected to immediately bear fruit, but perhaps this was indeed his plan all along.
like many nerds, i have written my fair share of code. and, like many nerds, i find some amount of dark joy in the search of tangibility within my intangible tools. though usually, for me, the programming language juice is not worth the squeeze. there will always be an amount of friction in converting ideas to computer programs, but many of the caveats and hurdles present in the pythons, golangs, and rusts et al. leave me reaching for them with a weary, reluctant hand.
through poking at CircleCI configurations at work, i found that they expose a lein repl that you can jack into and mortally wound safely reconfigure your instance. thusly, Clojure was fresh on the mind when sitting down to begin tinkering on projects anew. many Rich Hickey lectures later, i was sold on its idioms, and began writing much of my nonsense in Clojure, with a sprinkling of SBCL.
this nonsense includes a rewrite of my webbed site using a Clojure-based static site generator of my own design, and input method software drawing from Orthic shorthand and pen-computing paradigms of yore who’s proof-of-concept, quite frankly, was significantly easier to implement in python.
learning more functional programming concepts and the math behind them, there’s a lot of joy for me working in this manner. many of the ideas are new to me, and many are not, but within the nuance of implementation i’ve found an alignment that allows me an easier flow of ideas. for the first time in a long time, i have a go-to set of brushes with which to express myself.
i am sure like many educators, Clark put forth those ideas wrapped in seemingly archaic methods knowing that we may not be ready for them in that moment. ideas take time to grow, watered and nourished with experience-wrought perspective. but when we are ready, we will reach for them almost instinctively.
onward