Back from an Island somewhere far, far away
Reports of my professional demise have been, at various times, highly exaggerated, slightly understated, totally false and entirely likely.
But I'm back.
My quest for the Perfect Computer Programming Language has in the last several months taken me on a life-threatening tour around a vast and brooding ocean in a makeshift raft, kind of like the one by which Tom Hanks found his way back to civilization in Castaway after a plane wreck of sorts. It's amazing the humility you can learn at a command line console.
In my next series of posts (okay, I'll concede it: in my first series of posts) I plan to report on what I've learned. Whether starting a fire with Haskell, cracking open a coconut with Scala, performing a root canal in Ocaml, buliding rope from many palm tree leaves in Erlang, or even constructing a flotilla in F#, my solitary days as a lonely functional programmer have given me a deeper appreciation for the tradeoffs between the various computing paradigms, and I feel a bit l awkward now coming back to the commodity programming world--almost like I need to justify my existence all over again. Remind me, how do we program without pattern matching? What do you mean "avoid tail recursion"? And what's up with value assignments that can change over time? Has the world gone mad?
I plan to describe the way software would be built on an island paradise, and explore whether it's possible to bring some of the calm and serenity of life on that island without also having to suffer the mind-bending solitude and despair of ever being found gainfully employed again.
Hopefully, we'll both have fun. :)