Learning a new language is tough, really tough. And once you know a few it gets worse. Not because learning a new language gets harder, it just that you already know so many ways to do something, that learning another way seems pointless. You start working with the new language and you just think, "This is like perl but without half the features that make perl so cool."
I certainly gave it a try last year. First I tried out Lua which seems like an excellent language for programming wrist watches and other tiny projects, but I kept missing basic features like writing stepx += 2 ; instead of stepx= stepx + 2 ; so I passed on that, though it may come around again since Lua5 for PalmOS is just finishing beta. Then I looked at OCaml but never being all that excited by a the wonders of recursion, I fizzled out on that. I mean, the computer doesn' t really do recursion; it just back tracks and tries to figure out what you meant in the first place. So basically programming it becomes:
Figure out what you want to do.
Figure out how to turn it into a recursive process.
Code it.
Computer reads what you coded.
Computer tries to look for and identify recursive functions.
Computer tries to figure out how to implement the recursive function in a non-recursive way.
Computer maybe does something you want.
Maybe its like the old RPN calculators, except there the HW actually did a stack, and so you were just working with what the hardware could do instead of trying to remember order of operations and how many times you had pressed the
key on a TI calculator.
Anyways, this week I stuck my mouth where my money is and suggested that the Sunnyside restoration project use a Wiki to keep track of everything (and I offered to set it up). Not having any Wiki's handy, I went and took a look at the list of
WikiEngines which happens to be organized by language. No, I did not get the one
written in OCaml. I got one written in Ruby, so the first thing I actually had to do was get Ruby and mod_ruby installed and working. Now I'm working on the wiki part. Once that's working, I have a fully operational ruby environment that maybe I could even slap
Rails into. Very cool possibilities.
Of course another possibility is that I'll spend many hours on and off over the next week trying to hack
google maps to do multiple push-pins based on a user supplied list, which would be really cool. Maybe impossible. Probably a waste of time. But definately really cool.
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