What I've Been Up To

The more I actually do, the less I write.

In November, I didn't blog a single post. The time I usually spent writing went to doing Project Euler problems and learning Haskell.

Last month, I gave a presentation on functional programming with Haskell for Philly Lambda. In order to better understand Haskell (and Lisp) for the presentation, I wrote a simple Lisp interpreter in Haskell. Now I've been spending my time on revising and re-working the presentation for a lunch-and-learn for my day-job. I have also been reading an amazing book called Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Although I was interested in Clojure for a while, I honestly don't think it has much of a future. It's hardly a hundred-year language, yet it's not all that great for today's problems either.1 Specifically, web apps.

Thus, I've embarked on an adventure in my spare time. While my former startup-team deserted me to pursue other things, I continued to do R&D.2 My latest fancy is a compiler from an s-expression-based language to PHP. I thought I'd go with the whole standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants idea like Clojure, but my plan is that users of the language will not need to know a thing about PHP. However, someone who does should be able to reach in and access PHP's immense code-base.

Is it really a good idea to compile to PHP? I don't know. Would another language like Ruby, Python, or Common Lisp be more suitable? Possibly. This is simply meant to be an experiment, and I'm trying not to be afraid to make mistakes. Since I have a good deal of experience writing PHP, I thought using it as a target language would be the easiest thing to get a working prototype for.

The more I actually do, the less I write. Let's see if the converse is also true. ...I'll try to write more once I have something tangible.

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1. I get the impression there are many quirks in Clojure due to its tight integration with Java. Its meta-data on code is great, but it begs for a code-editor.

2. In my opinion, the rest of the team left to get jobs and independent design work due to fluctuating states of mind and fear of risk. Unlike them, I have higher goals which reduce my wavering and prevent me from turning away.