http://www.defmacro.org/ Ramblings on Lisp, Haskell, C++, compilers, web frameworks and more. en-us http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/taming-doubt.html Older people looked at me with gentle smiles, as if my curiosity and relentless drive is a product of my youth and will eventually wane. I suppose they thought it was cute. I think I might have noticed this, but I never paid much heed to it. I don't remember now because it never seemed to matter. I followed my gut, and learned as much as I could from people that were willing to help me, and everything else was of no concern to me. As I grew older and learned more I started to wonder. Am I really any good? There didn't seem to be an easy way to tell. Eventually, this detached wondering turned to doubt. I would spend only ten percent of my time working and the rest of the time I'd question the rank of my talent in relation to other people and some perceived absolute. Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:34:27 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/taming-doubt.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/taming-perfectionism.html There was a time in my life when I couldn't get anything done. I was studying many different subjects at once, from theoretical Computer Science, to Zen, to principles of graphics design, when I developed a perception of deep underlying beauty of all things. Suddenly I could tell beautiful code from ugly code, a beautiful design from ugly design, and beautiful writing from ugly writing. I could always do this to some degree, but this time the sense of beauty (or its lack) felt far stronger and more refined than ever before. It was so strong that I found myself unable to complete any serious tasks. Whenever I sat down to implement my vision (whether by coding, or writing, or designing), I'd find that what I produce inevitably falls short. The code was too crude, the writing too clumsy, and the design too ugly. No matter what I did, there would be something essential missing from my implementation, and I could never put my mind on what it was. Producing anything took forever, and ultimately I discarded it all because it just wasn't good enough. Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:31:15 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/taming-perfectionism.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/enso.html At 6:30am, at the gentle sound of the Burmese gong, I emerged from a deep state of absorption to find myself in the meditation hall of the Chuang Yen Monastery in upstate New York, surrounded by twenty shuffling men. I hadn't twitched a muscle for one hour and hadn't eaten since noon of the previous day, but neither stretching nor hunger were on my mind. I was aware of one and one thought only, which instantaneously pierced the very core of my being: everything I had read about the Japanese Enso symbol was real. Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:55:30 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/enso.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/relational.html Explicitly stating an interest for non-relational technologies is a little misleading. It suggests contempt for relational databases. And the talk about innovation suggests RDBMSes are are not innovative. Perhaps I started off on the wrong foot. Although my calculus is rusty, I am a mathematician at heart, and I can only admire the beauty and simplicity of relational algebra. Although modern databases are "pragmatized" versions of relational algebra, with much of its mathematical beauty stripped away, they appeal to me far more than most other tools. It's not just relational algebra. There are other things going for traditional databases in terms of mathematical beauty and innovation. For instance, it is far from obvious that it is possible to implement all four ACID properties simultaneously, and occasionally I am still amazed at how lucky we got. It is also amazing that traditional RDBMSes are interactive, while almost all other mainstream tools are not. I can type queries, compile stored procedures, modify the schema, and get immediate results, all without restarting the database. I am still fascinated at how people take this functionality for granted but don't mind complete impotence of Java in this department (sorry, hot deploy does not melt my butter the way Query Analyzer does). So what's missing? Why venture out to play with alternatives? Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:13:12 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/relational.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fractal.html Fractal is a Direct3D demo I wrote a number of years ago to showcase real-time procedural generation of natural phenomena on modern GPU hardware (GeForce 2, at the time). The demo implements the four elements - earth, fire, air (clouds and wind), and water. Procedural generation of natural phenomena was my passion before Lambda Calculus took over my life. Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:44:53 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fractal.html