Back to Basics

After a while things stop being new. Things that really used to excite you, stop exciting you. Things that you were passionate about, you stop being passionate about. That’s just how things work.

I wrote my very first computer program 26 years ago this month. It was in college, using a Perkin Elmer mini computer running Berkeley BSD 4.2 on a VT220 terminal (with a really good keyboard.) The program was written in Pascal. Pascal was the educational programming language of the time. Every time I went near the terminal, I approached with a sense of wonder. It felt like the possibilities were endless.

But, over time, the sense of wonder starts to wane. Once somebody starts paying you to do something, the sense of wonder starts to wane real fast. You don’t control it any more. You are likely to be producing something that somebody else wants you to produce. In a manner they want you to produce it.

I have been pondering my career recently. Such as it is. You do start pondering your career when you hit the wrong end of your forties. How can I get back that sense of wonder again?

I’ve always had a hankering after learning Lisp. I read about it even before I went to college twenty six years ago, and it has always fascinated me. Pretty well any programming concept you can think of, Lisp usually got there first.

One of my recent discoveries has been a series of books: The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer and The Reasoned Schemer teaching Scheme in quite a unique, accessible and fun style.

Scheme is a modern dialect of Lisp. There are lots of others including Clojure which is getting a lot of traction.

I think that learning a language from scratch, just for the fun of it, may just be the tonic for a mild dose of mid-career blues. Hopefully, that sense of wonder may return. I sure hope so.

I’ll let you know 😄