Warning: If you are new to programming, DO NOT READ THIS POST. GO BACK.

I’ve been going through the most amazing period in my life now. I’ve actually started to work for CAIR, DRDO this year and I am waiting to return there once my exams get over. I am enjoying every moment of it. So, now what does loosing one’s zeal have to do with enjoying oneself in a job that you really like? Nothing. But Its the lesson that I learnt, that has made me lose my zeal. So here goes the story…

I started my journey into this wonderful world of Lisp some time back, and it literally put my brain through a mixer. If you haven’t had the fun of putting your brain on a roller-coaster and watching it from afar, then you should try lisp. I promise you will enjoy it. Infact, Lisp is such an amazing language that if you don’t turn into a zealot, then you never got it in the first place, or so I thought. Now, moving a bit back in time, say a couple of years back. This was the time I learnt this funny language called python. I had the same “brain in the roller coaster experience”, dynamic typing, garbage collection, containers as part of the language, what not. This was like taking a kid who has never seen anything more than his own backyard playpen and giving him an “All rides free” pass to disney land. Thats exactly how I felt coming from programming in C/C++ for as long as I can remember. If you are a C/C++ hippie, or you are one of the many unfortunate souls who have been put through the torture of going through anna university thinking that all code is written inside of braces, take a look at python. I promise its great fun. Now all this talk about C++ brings about older memories… far older, when I was still in 8th. I had discovered the C programming language. I could let my computer dance to my tunes, or atleast dance at the tunes it was producing. I was amazed at all those silly vector graphics that I could produce with good old borland’s graphics library. I was amazed at my own skill, I endeavoured to write small games which no one but I would play (all night long). The fact that the computer could actually do “anything” I wanted excited me to an infinite extent.

See a pattern? Yes, I’ve been attached to each and every programming language I’ve ever learnt, thinking I could conquer the world with my new knowledge. How so naive of me. If you are under the same illusions that I was suffering from, I suggest go and write “production” code. Why? because production code is a wholly different deal from your hobby programming. if you are programming because there are no more good blogs to read, then its ok if you don’t put a tricky loop doing network i/o inside a try – catch/except (unwind-protect) kind of construct. But thats a big NO with production code. Thats downright stupid in production code. And you thought your pet language could do anything faster, better and sometimes even in supernatural ways than those of the “other” lesser languages? “Ha Ha Ha”, you self-delusional lemon-eater. In production code, when the demands are high everything that’s available tends to hit a brick wall. Wether its the global interpreter lock in python (one thats biting me big time right now) or the lack of good threading in lisp or the fact that working with C is like building a sky-scraper with lego blocks.

The fact that the available tools don’t really fit your needs is the ground reality, no matter who says what on which news group, trade show or promotional video. The reason you got hired was precisely because of this reason. I am here to retrofit it so everyone else can have a gala time. I am here to give these people the tools, the frameworks so that they can write their code without them worrying about things like “deep-copy vs. shallow-copy”. They can create threads without the worry that their pricey “dual-core” system doesn’t see it as a huge process which is using too much cpu time and asks the scheduler to put it to sleep. Its these kind of things that I am building, that has brought upon this realisation.

That no language, no matter how fun, mind-blowing, roller-coaster loopin a language it is, it ain’t perfect

This has also sucked the zeal that I had whenever I had embarked on learning a new language. Strangely it has made me cynical of these languages. Whenever I start seeing a new language, I can hear myself saying, “Hmm.. thats where I would run into trouble..”, Its made me turn pessimistic. Probably it gave me a little more maturity in language design, but thats debatable.

I am constantly mumbling three words in my sleep, consciously when I am trying to debug code, or think about problems of/in design. I am chanting them to keep me going, to stop my pessimistic “inner demons” from taking over, I am mumbling those three words as I type right now. I am mumbling “Half glass full.“

Signing Off,

Vishnu Vyas