2010 Retrospective On This Whole Futuremint Thing
This year I’ve actually made an effort to try to blog on a reasonably regular schedule. I started off attempting it monthly, but it slipped over the summer. Expect me to get back to maybe… bi-monthly? I think I’ll start with something I know I can handle. So bi-monthly sounds good.
This was a big year of change… but not all for the better. I often change things just to see if there is something better somewhere else. I always say, “you can’t knock it till you try it!” But I do it in ways where I can test the waters a little on the other side and still come back if I need to. I’ve done a bit of “coming back” this year.
I was doing Rails freelance work at the beginning of the year on some products I helped build so I knew the code bases well. I stopped freelancing in April to focus on just my day job (a change). Turns out I think I need to be doing more than one thing at a time (coming back). I wanted to focus on only Smalltalk this year (a change). I’m now just as annoyed by Smalltalk’s shortcomings in production as I am with Ruby’s (coming back… sort of; mostly just irritated).
I switched to Ubuntu exclusively in May and stopped using OS X (a change). Turns out I still get annoyed by Linux’s small little broken things here and there just like I did a decade ago. I’m in the process of switching back to OS X over the next month or so just because day to day usage is easier for me (coming back). All of the software I need is more of a pain to install on OS X than Ubuntu, but that happens less often than Ubuntu’s daily irritations. Its truly been “death by a thousand paper-cuts” for me. But Linux is still second-to-none on the server.
I started up freelance work on Rails again. Its good to be back! Changing to Ruby 1.9 & Rails 3 really alleviates some pain points that drove me away. However, impolite monkey-patching by library writers still infuriates me. It will be the death of Ruby, and the Refinements feature proposed for Ruby 2.0 can’t be finished — and back ported — soon enough!
Over the summer I switched our Smalltalk app from using the Magma OODB (written in Smalltalk) to CouchDB (a change). This was definitely a change for the better. Every time I get to work with CouchDB I’m happy. It really is great to work with (see my previous posts about it). So this change is a win! I’m even starting a few Rails projects on CouchDB. However I am predictably unhappy with what’s out there for CouchDB integration with Rails 3. I guess I’m just getting old and cranky, or its just NIH.
I did a project in Scheme for work about 5 years ago, and I’ve started to get back into some more Lisps (a change). I can already tell that a Lisp (Clojure or Common Lisp, not sure yet) will be my favorite language of choice! Scheme just didn’t do it for me. But a good Common Lisp environment in Emacs is my favorite over any Smalltalk, or any commercial IDE money can buy. Clojure in Emacs isn’t quite as smooth, but still really good. I’ve really been enjoying working through Land of Lisp, and can’t wait for the final version of Joy of Clojure. I also have some Lisp projects (also on CouchDB) that I’m excited to put more time into next year. One may even make it to see the light of the public!
Something that always bothers me in a programming language is how hard it is to increase the levels of abstraction. Most languages can only go so far. Ruby breaks down because of its open classes and lack of macros (though evaling interpreted strings is… sort of a hack that works at times). Smalltalk breaks down because everything is message sends to an instance of a class. You can’t abstract above an instance of a class. I know there is more to it but practically this is what happens. There is no easy way to abstract a pattern of a collection of interacting class for example.
Lisp on the other hand has macros. Common Lisp’s macros are awesome. They’re messy and you can shoot yourself in the foot with them and they need to be used sparingly… but there is absolutely no better way to make yourself a nice little DSL than macros in Common Lisp. I’ve made a few mini-DSLs in Smalltalk and Ruby and the code that runs them behind the scenes is really ugly. There is a visual shift between using the DSL and implementing it in code.
But the implementation is just as easy to read in Lisp as the usage because of its syntax. Yes… I love all of those parenthesis. Once you realize what they let you do you will too. But you absolutely need an editor that balances them for you.
So lots of things changed, some things went back to the old ways. Expect more exciting posts next year about your favorite (or not) programming languages or goofy web technologies here! Happy New Year’s!
