Two years since I've been a serious programmer. In the interim, I've done some toy programming, a little perl grease for the wheels of an otherwise working website for example. But no real programming, no real projects. Such is life when you're writing your dissertation. Anyway, I dusted off my Java IDE today, got the latest version of everything, and was ready to dive in to my latest idea.
I should have looked before I dove in. I nearly broke my neck on all the new stuff. I mean, aspects, annotations, generics, unit testing, oh my. Back when I started my graduate student career I did not understand how my advisor could become so behind the times (she has a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, and shared an office with RMS, surely she'd never let her coding skills slip, right?). But now I understand. I'm going to let myself go. This next generation of my ideas will likely be implemented by someone else, a snot-nosed know it all, I hope. One that will never understand how I could let my skills lapse.
But that's the circle of life. Right up until I eat that know it all for being a little too snide. Then it's more of, say, an ellipse of life.
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Now you know why I sometimes laugh for no apparent reason. Updated whenever the mood strikes me.
What the heck?
While this used to be a sort of random collection of thoughts, it evolved into an experiment: can I tell a story that people are interested in? Is it pure conceit to think of myself as a writer? So, there's a thread of entries under the label of "Pretty", which is the working title for my, ahem, book. Of all things. Anyway, you can see the posts organized into chronological order here:
Pretty Chronology
About Me
Neighbors on the Interweb
Content is Copyright 2001-2006, Eric Eslinger. All Rights Reserved.
2 comments:
The other day I went to write a shell script. Nothing major, just something to automate converting Ogg-Vorbis to mp3. I fired up gvim, typed "#!/usr/bin/sh" and then froze. For the life of me I couldn't remember the correct syntax. I've only been away from shell scripting for six months and already it's leaking out of my head.
Of course, I have a mind like a steel sieve, but I wasn't expecting the holes in the sieve to be quite so large and effective. Makes me wonder what else has slipped out of my mind when I wasn't looking.
Still a snot-nosed CS undergraduate here. I even got a button at a science-fiction convention to express my frustration: "It's OK to re-invent the wheel, but I hate hearing people argue about how many corners it should have."
Thanks for the post; it opened my eyes to exactly how little computer science academics get to program. It makes me wonder why bother? But I guess some CS people don't really like to program in the first place.
Ethan
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