A Lisp Mind, Trapped in a Java World

You know how it is.  Slogging names like SomethingReallyLongWithItsTypeAtTheEndDialog.  Groveling through docs endlessly while trying to remember how to make the widget work right, but the names and the choices are so similar, you have to try a bunch of them before figuring out the right one, which might turn out to be the wrong one for some configuration or target system, but the docs are so light and confusing, they don't tell you that, you have to find out for yourself while the pressures of life squeeze like a vice and HURRY UP AND SHIP IT is all anybody ever says to you along with I THOUGHT YOU WERE DONE?!  Madness.  As if that's not enough, endlessly waiting for the build to finish and launch before you can agonize over the slow-motion rumblings of a debugger spitting out insane volumes of meaningless crap for an indication of what really went wrong that got set to null for you to find like buried treasure somewhere up there after scrolling around.  Again.  And again.

I wrestled with a simple math problem in Java for a while yesterday.  For far longer than it should have taken.  I was progressively more sure my brain injury was slowing me down.  Or I did think it, because I couldn't believe I couldn't solve a simple trigonometry problem involving a handful of variables.  I spun over it in Java, editing, thinking, compiling, waiting, building, testing as time flew by.  I started thinking I needed to get out of programming and accept I was old, broken, and rapidly losing intelligence and vitality.  I paced the room waving my hands as each held variables and my mind creaked and groaned under the strain and I felt the desire to overcome a simple problem rapidly diminishing.  I never quit, but quit was all I heard in my head, screaming like a Siren into every fiber that was me.  I was almost seduced, but then I remembered...Lisp.

I fired up Clisp.  I wrote an equation and fed it variables.  Then, I wrote a loop with an equation and the output got me... thinking.  Where my mind had been a wildly vibrating pile of gelatin about to implode only minutes earlier, it was suddenly calm, focused, and coming to life.  In two minutes I had carefully considered each step, then prototyped, considered some more, realized, and, eureka, solved what took hours to only confound me in Java.

For a moment, life was good again.

One day, I hope to be able to go forward into Lisp for good and the onto construction of some of these crazy ideas I have, and not get dragged into hell and halfway back to C++ ever again.  Amen.

Early January Update

I really need to work on coming up with better titles for articles.

I've been working on Android apps.  It's keeping me from writing my pending Java-based Lisp-thing.  It's not keeping me from working on it at all, because it's the next app in the queue.  I just had to get some apps out of my head and get the flow going - for personal as well as professional reasons.

The last Android app is in the final stages.  Hopefully, not more than a couple of more days.  Then it'll be on to the Lisp thing I'm working on, because I have plans to make it the foundation of a Java-based Common Lisp on every platform kind of thing.  With a slammin' interface that *does things* that'll blow your mind.

I hope, I mean, I really hope so.  But don't hold me to it.  My kind of cool might not be your kind of cool.  Though I'm pretty sure I wouldn't work on it if it wasn't some kind of cool.  It's Lisp, how could it not have some kind of maximum inherent cool in it?

After all this Android coding, I'm looking forward to getting into a Common Lisp groove.