The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)

Sometimes it's nice to shed all that bullshit and just create something.

Sometimes, only on languages with the least amount of syntax and semantics you're able to sculpt that fleeting idea you had. Inspiration is very delicate, and it doesn't take a lot for it to die down because you forgot to update npm and your Emacs config is borked.

Can you elaborate on that? I think you are saying that REPLs in other languages don't do what you can do in Lisp, but I don't think I know enough to fully understand why.

Which is why I do best with the command line, piping outputs and rapidly iterating to get the output I want.

And why I struggled so much writing Python in a larger, more complex script/app. I wanted to constantly run and rerun the smaller parts to get each one just right. Unfortunately that doesn't work great when you're interacting with a half dozen different APIs that take minutes to run each time. Until I realized what was slowing me down, I was just getting more and frustrated.

Now I am at least aware of the issue. Part and parcel of growing from sysadmin to DevOps to coder, I guess? Now I know to look for shims or stubs that help me. Now I can write tests that isolate and verify, rather than run the whole damn thing end to end.

It helps me to think of objects as those command line tools. Their method parameters are the stdin that get passed through pipes. I apologize that this isn't particularly profound, but sometimes epiphanies are made from smaller realizations.

Maybe I should have tried writing part of my most recent script in Lisp? Just to see if it resonated like described in this thread?

You start a fresh REPL session with a vague idea of something you want to build. You have good tooling that enables you to write code in your favourite editor and pipe it to the REPL through a socket. You write a couple of functions and send them to the REPL. You call them a few times with some test arguments, maybe define a couple global variables while testing, and realize one of the functions doesn't quite behave the way you want. You tweak the code and send it again to the REPL. The function is redefined and works properly now.

You're happy with what you have for now, so you save the entire current environment of the REPL, functions and global variables and all, into a file (called an image) on your disk. The next day, you come up with a great new feature so you load up the image and continue exactly where you left off yesterday, with all your functions and even global variables as they were defined previously. You add your new feature, all while testing and tweaking your functions interactively, and then you save the new environment into an updated image. Any other code that loads that image will be able to take advantage of your updated functions and variables now.

The power of lisp is not just the fact that there's a REPL — a lot of languages have that now. It's the ability to save and reload the entire current state of the REPL (interactively or programmatically), which enables the powerful interactive development that so many lispers, including myself, rave about.

My career (if may be called that) can be summarized by a constant swing.

On one side, I have a "job" where I start well but after a while I fall out of grace from higher-ups because I inevitably end up calling out their bullshit and/or start seeing the pointlessness of it all and lose interest in progressing there. This leads me to either quitting or getting fired, which brings me to the other side of the swing: I dive into another project where I try to do everything "my way", no compromises, no shortcuts, no justification of "best practices" because "that is how everyone else does it".

While I am on this side, I feel incredibly productive and I am forced to grow/learn a lot of things that are required to the problem at hand. Yet, because of this hard-line stance on not compromising, my projects gets either out-competed by a startup that was (rightly) willing to take the shortcuts I didn't take, or I end up building something that had no market for, or (worse) there is a market and no strong competitor but I refused to pivot out of the original idea for a matter of "principle" that only I cared about - hub20 definitely fell into that category.

When I am finally out of steam (or financial reserves), I go back into the job market, usually with a renewed set of skills which helps me land a job that was better than the previous one, and the cycle is complete.

Honestly, I am tired of this. These swings were fun for the first 3 or 4 times but now I am increasingly feeling that my luck will run out soon and that I need to get out of this swing, no matter on what end. Either I finally make one of my projects more than a nice portfolio piece or I learn how to settle and navigate the corporate world without hating it and myself so much.