Writing Mergesort In Scheme Makes Me Sooo Grateful For Python. And Javascript. And Java. And Ruby. And
Writing mergesort in Scheme makes me sooo grateful for python. And Javascript. And Java. And Ruby. And C#. Heck, I’m even grateful for C, at least it lets you access specific list indices.
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You can change your font and you can change your float
You can set margins, that’s just the style you wrote
You can { display: none; } and you can overflow
But you’ll always google how to center a <div>.
Does anyone read programming books? Like actually?
Keeping them on a shelf having skimmed the table of contents doesn’t count.
I continue to be surprised today. Haskell is also cool, at least based on what I’m reading. I haven’t written any yet, though, so we’ll see.
Maybe I’m just in an open mood. Should I break out the old assembly docs and test that theory?
.... Nah, I definitely shouldn’t do that.
I can’t even style a SCROLLBAR without it looking like a potato.
Long live Indices
Question for a higher power: Is the ability to access specific list indices something I’ve always taken for granted? Or should it be an expectation?
Scheme’s implementation of a “list” is a series of nested pairs (sorta nested - I’m calling it that even though that’s not completely correct), so you can either get the first element in the list or all of the others UNLESS you know the specific index you need in a constant fashion (i.e. “c” + [combination of “a”s and “d”s] + “r”).
Haskell has those sweet sweet index accessors we all know and love from C and it’s children and even most of it’s counterparts. Even in C itself there was functionality to store an address to a pointer and then just do pointer arithmetic to access an index like arr[2] -> 0x#{ADDRESS OF arr} + 2. It’s simple and straightforward, so I don’t feel like I’m being difficult to expect that of my programming language. Am I, though?
You’ve probably noticed by now that this post isn’t meant to be a coherent case for anything; it’s more of a ramble and a rant. Honestly, though, just give me accessors (and mutatability too please... I’m looking at you Go. Nobody thinks you’re slick with your whole “arrays are static and annoying use slices because we’re edgy”).
It’s interesting how as I’ve progressed as a programmer the things I turn to for therapy have also progressed.
At first it was Scratch: after a span of getting frustrated by Python I would play with Scratch to at least make things that did what I wanted them to.
A little while later I wrote HTML and CSS to feel good about myself, because even when the default padding for <body> screws up your positioning there’s at least SOMETHING on the screen instead of an aggressive error message.
Now, it’s python. When Scheme or Haskell or C or Java or C# (less so C# - it’s actually pretty nice) or even Javascript are bothering me I can always turn to Python to feel better.
I wonder what it’ll be next? Maybe one day I’ll see C++ as my relief. Probably not. But maybe. Perhaps the final evolution of a programmer is when you can feel completely peaceful while writing Posix level C. Perhaps even assembly. Probably not. But perhaps.
So I RECOGNIZE that the .NET framework is immensely popular for a good reason. I RECOGNIZE that Visual Studio is a wonderful, amazingly built tool that can probably cut my development time in half. I also RECOGNIZE that simply MAKING A PROJECT has taken me entirely too long.
All of that being said, I RECOGNIZE that the problem definitely is with me rather than with one of the most prominent frameworks, development tools, and collection of programming languages in the industry.
That doesn’t mean I’m not still angry.
Being able to access all of the WSL distros, the powershell, and the cmd from the same place is a super cool feature with the new windows terminal, but you know what’s even cooler? Getting to change all of the colors and fonts so easily. I’m very happy.
I like Cilk++. It’s so nice to just be like “Hey I want this for loop to have some parallelism” then only have to replace the “for” with “cilk_for”.
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he/himComplaining on Tumblr is a good alternative to punching my computer screen, right?
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