Recent Posts
Quitting the Land of Lisp
Despite its creative approach and genuinely delightful music video, “Land of Lisp” by Conrad Barski, MD presents significant challenges for learners.
The remainder of this post isn’t one of those “I failed but then persevered” stories. Instead it is about how even a supposedly beginner-friendly book with cute comics and clever humor can make you feel like an impostor in your own profession – even 25 years in. It’s about finding, despite living your life on a lode of stubbornness, the courage to close the tabs, delete the ebook from your iPad, and move on. For those that don’t read the body, I’d recommend David Touretzky’s Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction.
This post is also a look at how I approach authoring curriculum in my work: what I offer my learners and what offends my sensibilities. If you’re into writing technical curriculum, this might be an interesting exploration. Code samples and quotes will be given. This will be a longer post.
My principal complaints about Land of Lisp are these:
- The code samples leap around in difficulty in a way that hampers learning and which invites imposter syndrome. Instead of what I or a median learner needed, the book served the author’s interests in a way that suggested I was beneath the book, or it was embarrassed by writing to my level of need
- The book’s structure and over-packed code listings assume dedicated blocks of focused time that most working professionals – and especially parents – simply don’t have.1
- As a variant of #1, above, the book’s tasks also consistently bring in extraneous tools and concerns (Graphviz and directed graph syntax) at the expense of covering tools and concerns that are a core part of Lisp practice and culture (e.g. Lisp’s unique interrupts, its formidable debugger, the SLIME/SLIMV environments)
…But its video is a stone-cold bop. 2
The Ashes of Phoenix
If there are great eras of music in my life, one of them happens to be the one that coincides with the rise of Pandora (and, later, Spotify). In Austin in the last few years before 2010, I remember finding Tift Merritt, the First Aid Kit, the deeper solo work of Peter Murphy on Pandora. After we returned to San Francisco in 2010, it seemed every playlist and algorithmic guess from the music machines had one entry in common: Phoenix’s “Lisztomania.”
Where’d they go? I mean Phoenix as I ask that, but I also, come to think of it, mean Pandora. And why? Was there some cultural moment that they were a part of that is now dust?
Nostalgia for Aqua
In 2001, my first Mac, the iMac, embodied computing as furniture. Its translucent white half-dome base housed a DVD drive that melded seamlessly into the surface, like some protean sci-fi spaceship.
From the dome’s apex rose a silver articulating arm suspending the screen - substantial enough to grab and adjust. You could pivot it down during afternoon slumps or angle it to show a friend iTunes visualizations. Light enough to carry, it could migrate to the living room to DJ parties. Encountered in le boudoir, it suggested taste, restraint, and an acceptable level of geekery in a way that wouldn’t make a guest think about doing a 180. Add on a slim, clicky keyboard; a one-button mouse; and surprisingly punchy spherical speakers and you had a computer that could be, as CEO Steve Jobs vision-cast, the hub of your digital life.
Heck, I started this blog on that machine.
This was computing’s last public era, before it retreated into the private universes of our misnamed “phones.” While this openness lived in the hardware’s noteworthy physical design, it was equally present in OSX’s Aqua interface. Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of nostalgia for Aqua’s aesthetics. I think these various nostalgia projects:
- a bag
- historical research
- a recreation of the Aqua UI as open source project
suggest a lament in our hearts:
Computers (phones) today make my heart sad. I want to remember computing when it didn’t make my heart sad. I want to see computers like that again.