Long time no post

It's been a long time since I have last posted anything to my blog. Well, I hope to find the time to post more regularly now.

For now, I have decided to try out Microsoft's Windows Live Writer. It's making a good first impression -- let's see how I like it in a few weeks (providing I find the time to post :) ).

Hackers and Painters

I read this book to recover from a large amount of business books that I had read over the last few months. I thought it would be nice and light. And I guess it was -- well, maybe it was a little too light.
Here is what I got from it

• Nerds have a hard childhood
• Common Lisp is good

Well, I guess I don't really see myself as a nerd (although I am a self-professed geek), so that bit didn't really apply to me. And I knew already that at least some knowledge of common Lisp would probably make me a better coder.

Anyways, on the brighter side, Paul Graham has some interesting (and at times very provocative) insights into the evolution of programming languages at large, as well as which language to use for current projects. I think that the book suffers somewhat from Graham's attempt to make it readable for non-technical readers. On the one hand I guess most readers will struggle with the idea of 'closures' (even a lot of software types will, let alone non-developers; and non-mathematicians :) ), whereas I sometimes felt that I would have liked some additional technical comments.

I did get some ideas around entrepreneurship out of the book though -- for example the idea of using Common Lisp for internet based (server based) applications is an interesting one. Having said that, I am fairly firmly rooted in the thick client arena, and I am quite happy to stay there. At the moment I feel a little dubious about the take-up of web apps again. But I am sure some of the online calendars will stick around;)

Well, closures and lambda calculus seem poised to make their way into C# (my weapon of choice at the moment), so I guess I'll have a think about getting a good book on Common Lisp at some point to get the information rigth from the source.