Weeknotes 2024W44

Said goodbye to my home

I packed up the place I called home for the last two years and left for the capital this morning. I said goodbye to the only barber I ever went to, the shop owner down the street, and the women who gave me so much msmen and cake. I went to the youth center where I worked and said goodbye to whoever was there that afternoon.

The longest goodbye was with my host family. We had dinner and tried to keep things light with jokes and stories from two years ago when I couldn’t do anything by myself. I didn’t have the words to thank them enough. They helped me so much, always giving and never asking for anything in return. I learned so much from them and they did everything they could to help me even when it was inconvenient.

It’s all very bittersweet. I’m excited to go home, speak English, and have more third places and social activities to choose from. At the same time, I’ll miss my friends here and my humble little town that changed my life.

Went down the language-oriented programming rabbit hole

I came across Pollen which is a language used specifically for publishing books online. The author, thankfully, has written a lot about his process and why he chose the tools he did. He wrote about a cool programming language Racket and Lisp dialects in general. It got me excited about it.

So, I followed him down the rabbit hole and it went deep. I’m in the phase where it’s all a big jumble and I can’t cohesively say what I’ve learned. It’s all new stew in my brain. What really sucked me in was reading about language oriented programming. This is where you create a new programming language specifically for a problem or domain and use that language to solve problems rather than using a general-purpose language directly.

For example, say we went camping and wanted to roast marshmallows. We don’t have those fancy metal pokers but you do have your trusty multi-tool. You could use the pliers to hold a marshmallow over the fire or maybe stick it onto the awl and hold it that way. You might burn yourself and you’ll definitely make a mess but it’d probably work. The other solution is to use your multi-tool to sharpen a stick and use that to roast marshmallows.

Here, the multi-tool is the general-purpose programming language (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.) and the stick is a domain-specific language. The multi-tool is a jack of all trades, master of none—a fine choice for lots of different problems but not made for any one thing in particular. On the other hand, the sharpened stick is really good for roasting marshmallows and that’s about it.

I’m very intrigued and I’ll definitely be going through Beautiful Racket by the author of Pollen (written in Pollen, too!) when I get some free time.

Bits and bobs

• Did an informational interview with someone I respect about what it’s like being a technical writer.
• I’m on the same list as Derek Sivers, Justin Duke, Tracy Durnell, and Herman Martinus. Some of my favorite writers and inspirations. I was interviewed for Manu Moreale’s People and Blogs series and my modest little website has never gotten so much attention.
• Finished reading There Is No Good Card for This by Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell. I enjoyed it—a good little empathy handbook that pairs well with Atlas of the Heart. Sometimes it was a bit too “cutesy” for my taste but excellent, practical tips throughout.
• Started reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It was on my list for a while but it got pushed to the top after the aforementioned informational interview.

Links

I was a bit light on reading this week. My RSS and inbox are full so hopefully there is more here next week!

• Spooky homepage process by anh. I love seeing “behind the scenes” into how people do the cool things they do. Especially creative people that create something that causes an emotional reaction.
• Racket/Lisp related link dump: Why learn Racket? A student’s perspective by Micah Cantor. Why Racket? Why Lisp? by Matthew Butterick. Why language-oriented programming? Why Racket? by Matthew Butterick. Every article I read about Racket is generally positive and Butterick writes very convincingly.
• Is everyone pretending to understand inflation? by Search Engine. One of my “if-you-could-go-back” university majors is economics and this itched my brain nicely.
• Why’s it so hard to tax billionaires? by Search Engine. Billionaires don’t usually take a normal salary because they would pay a crazy high income tax. Instead, they get paid in company stock and have an “income” of near-zero. The company goes up in value and so do they. When they want to go out and buy something (groceries, a car, a new island, etc.) they don’t sell their stocks because they would pay capital gains tax on that. They go to a bank and get a loan using their stock as collateral. The interest is way lower than what their tax would be and they don’t ever need to pay it back. Buy, borrow, die.

Created: 2024-11-03

Last modified: 2024-11-03