On a recent episode of “Fresh Air,” Terry Gross interviewed Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the bandleader on Jimmy Fallon’s “Late Night” show and one of the driving forces behind one of the most protean hip-hop acts ever, The Roots. I really can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed the interview. One of the most interesting bits is how he described deejaying. I was struck by how similar it is to the way I hear other programmers describe coding:

Here’s Questlove on Deejaying:

I believe the number one rule of DJ is: You have to immerse yourself in music. Immerse. Not love music, you have to immerse yourself. [...] is: So for me it's like a chess game. I'm thinking about the payoff song that's going to be 20 songs from now and how can I build up to that moment. [...] the only time that I will be a complete ass to a person is when I'm deejaying. I absolutely want zero interruptions, because I'm in a trance and you're breaking my trance, and I need to know how to get from point A to point B. [...] I can go anywhere. [...] that world is my oyster and I need complete absolute concentration.

Let’s do a few search and replaces to make that quote describe programming, shall we?¹

This is a post I had sitting in my drafts folder, uhm, for about 2 years. I’m fishing it out now because I’m a completionist masochist.

A friend forwarded on to me this post entitled: “Don’t study latin if you want to become a better programmer” by Daniel Lemire, professor of Computer Science at the University of Quebec. His piece questions the wisdom of teaching Latin as a means of creating a better programmer. As a lover of the Classical world, Latin student, programmer, and teacher of programming, I found myself disagreeing with his conclusion: in my programming practice I definitely recognized competencies learned while studying Latin resurfacing again and again. I believe Lemire is missing some nuance to his description of learning and I think that they might explain how we come to different conclusions. Let me start with a usage where I agree with Lemire.

I Program, Should I Learn Latin to Get Better?

Let’s start with the obvious case. If you are, say, learning Python and then one fine day you think: “My goodness, I’d like to be better at this” and your solution is “I’m going to go buy a copy of Wheelock’s Latin and get to it,” you’re probably choosing a sub-optimal strategy. Your time would be better spent at one of the following

1. Writing Python
2. Reading Python
3. Finding a Python mentor / meet-up, etc.

While I agree that there are individuals who, upon learning Latin with some background in programming probably found some way to have it drive their programming acumen forward — say, by writing a RubyGem ;) — this is probably a vanishingly small amount and not something I’d recommend as a general rule.

So let me concede the obvious use of this utterance and agree that you should not do task Y to become better at task X. However, I don’t think this is what the author’s post was intending to analyze. My interpretation of his post is that since he “believe[s] that knowledge is only weakly transferable, …[he favours] practical skills that are immediately useful.” And here’s where I think his model loses some of its nuanced understanding of learning and thus becomes less compelling.

Does Latin Study Contribute to Learning Programming More Easily?

I believe that there are transferable skills that come from broad-based learning and that they are worth the time and the effort of acquiring.

Specifically broad-based topics that train, enhance or instill facility with metacognitive competencies do transfer well to other studies. I would contend that learning Latin tends to force its students to acquire a series of metacognitive competencies that would prove highly useful in learning to program (a raw skill) and learning to be a programmer (a set of behaviors).

Is it guaranteed that other “practical, immediately useful” skills such as Karate or swimming would fail to offer these learnings — certainly not! And I should hope that learners of all ages and all disciplines experience the joy of finding these metacognitive competencies in new nooks and crannies as they learn more about their world. For me, that’s quite possibly the best part of learning and, as I approach mid-age, one of the great advantages I have in learning material over a 16 year old: I know that I have a battle-tested series of competencies that allow me to ascertain, interpret, and integrate learning in a way such that new facts feel natural versus foreign objects that must be toted about.

Nevertheless, I believe that the pedagogy of Latin has something special to it: something instructs both moral character (the noble sentiments of the ancients) as well as intellectual character, its metacognitive competencies. There’s a reason, after all, that the archetypal “teacher molds the mind of a future generation and is never forgotten” movie is Mr. Chips and Latin, long before Keating taught poetry in “Dead Poets Society” or Escalante taught calculus in Los Angeles in “Stand and Deliver.”

Let me try to list a few of these competencies.

I recently found a tool that has really improved my life: jq. jq can extract, restructure and change JSON data. Professional programmers often call this operation “munging,” “massaging,” or “frobnicating.” The rest of this post will take you through an example of some frobnication.

A great feature that ships with VSCode is the “tasks” capability. I’ve not seen many developers use it, so I thought I’d document how it’s made my life blogging with a statically-generated site simpler.

Often, when doing any development, developers find themselves performing certain loops: drop to shell, run some command, capture output, paste output back into the editor, etc. Eventually most developers wind up curating a per-project set of shell aliases and functions to accelerate that loop. Perhaps the high-water mark for this behavior is the Rails framework which came with a task runner, rake, by default.

I’m glad to say that VSCode has a built-in task runner facility that can be leveraged to make whole series of routine tasks much more pleasant.

Recently at work we decided to run a linter to check our spelling. This produced a lot of output from years of, uhm, typos. The errors found (and exceptions that needed to go into our custom dictionary!) were saved in a JSON file. I was looking for a way to use this JSON file to help vim help me work through this backlog efficiently. Vim proved up to the challenge when I configured the following values correctly.

• :makeprg
• :make
• The quickfix window
• :errorformat

I’ll give a strategy for using these in the extended post.

This Friday I will shut down my personal Blue App and Instagram accounts forever. I’m transitioning to a newsletter for low-volume updates. I hope you’ll subscribe: https://stevengharms.com/newsletter. The first newsletter will go out on Friday.

My motivations are simple: Facebook has failed to steward their platform well, they have cheapened the notion of friendship, and they feed the worst of our voyeuristic tendencies. If you’re interested in my reasoning, please see my blog post on the matter.

Donald Knuth, the Stanford computer scientist involved in most of the major research innovations on that campus — including email, wrote:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.¹

Of Facebook properties this same can be said: it has been plenty for one lifetime.

Posted to Facebook as Farewell

As I prepare to log out one final time, I’d like to tell you about how I wish social media would have gone. It didn’t go this way. Greed and control and perverse incentives got in the way. I’ll tell you how it was in the late 90’s &emdash; how it was small, quaint, and good &emdash; and how it turned into the blighted, “alternative facts” hellscape of today.

The Bulletin-Board System (BBS) Influence

I recently came across Craig Mod’s article for Wired, “The Healing Power of Code,” and it was like encountering myself in a mirror.