It seems like my motivation, since I left the hospital, is always falling down. Unless I’m doing something new and interesting, I’m unable to keep myself focused.
This is my reason to start the work on ruby-elf and the whole analysis thing. Unfortunately, doing the analysis that way does not seem to be the easiest way at all.
Add to that the missed challenge with C#. When I was first told I had to develop in .NET with C#, beside a first understandable visceral reaction to that, I was excited to the idea of learning a new language. It has been quite some time since I learn my last useful language. While I tried to learn LISP (ELISP to be exact), that is quite a bit jump for me, as I’m way too used to non-functional programming languages.
I’ve been wanting to look at ADA for quite a while, and after the last In Our Time podcast (I’m podcast-addicted lately), I decided it was the right time to at least start looking at the thing. It does sound quite interesting after reading a bit about it, so I’ll be trying to read about it in the next week in my spare time. It might come handy the next time I get a job to work on embedded stuff.
I admit I’m not sure how ADA support for SQL databases is, but if there is any kind of support, I’m tempted to rewrite part of my elf analysis code in ADA (and even if there is any, maybe I can do that to cowstat at least). The intrinsic support to multi-threading is what I’m more fascinated from, especially for things like cowstats that could easily analyse multiple file at once, rather than doing it sequentially.
I am really afraid of what the pancreatitis did to me on a spiritual/mental level, more than physical, lately. Not like the physical damage is nothing, it’s actually quite a lot; luckily I didn’t smoke or drink before, as now I can’t do it for sure (well, it wouldn’t have been good to do even if I didn’t have the pancreatitis, but who had similar experience knows what I mean 😉 ). But the spiritual damage seems to be more than just fear to me. I really am thinking a lot of how much time I’m left, and how much I wasted my time before. I really wanted one day to find the right person, have a family, children, … and while the idea itself was already quite faint before (I’m too geeky to find a girl who can tolerate me), now it seems to be impossible altogether.
But nevermind this depressing thoughts, I sincerely think Summer of Code will give me at least something new to work on, with the students to mentor.. or at least I hope so 😉 So please start working already on your applications!
I also “collect” programming languages. I was inspired by Haskell for the same reasons you were looking at Ada (inherent parallel programming). Sometimes it hard to remember that the current batch of OOP languages isn’t all there is. However, I found the syntax of Haskell very awkward. I don’t languages that “degenerate” in to an excess of wierd symbols.I, too, just was diagnosed with Chronic Pancreatitis (based on your comments, I assume that’s what you have). At first, I was quite knocked. I, too, didn’t have any problem with the alcohol or smoking, so that was no big adjustment. I think the biggest was mental – faced with limitations. However, slowly I’ve changed my thinking. With careful management, I think I can easily live 10-20 years (I am 50), so I am going to make the best of it. The only thing I would warn people is please get life insurance while you can. I will never be able to due to this diagnosis (except very limited, expensive policies basically for burial). Anyhoo, it’s not the end, just a big bump, and there is plenty that is still doable.
I thought I would leave my contact info in case you ever want to talk about your Pancreatitis. Don’t let it get you down!
Agh, not again, its Ada, not ADA 🙂 (you yourself cite the article on the person after whom it got the name ;)).Anyway, on SQL bindings take alook at the apq bug (#149268) in bugzilla. There is even abuild, which has not been converted to the proper form yet though IIRC, plus some other small package mentioned.
Also, following up on our yesterday’s discussion, where you asked on some reading. I recalled, that, some years ago (drobbins times, were you around then? I believe some time late 2003?) there were talks on portage problems and limitations (back then already :), in fact, I think they were there as long as I remember) and even push to rewrite portage, with a stray flamewar or two along the road. One of those prompted me to do a little excersise in Ada, formally a proposal of using Ada for then-discussed portage-ng (New Generation, no less :)).As I really did not consider it a serious submission for the purpose of portage replacement (I was already old enough to know what all such proposals end up with), I did consider it a good chance to demonstrate Ada’ abilities. So, it cam at around 1000 LOCs and with comments intended for people who never saw Ada code before. It implements some basic dependency tracking and it comes with “ebuild” generator, to quickly prepare contents of test directory. I thought you might be interested to look at some Ada code on topic at least marginally relevant to Gentoo.I must admit, I did not really look at it again since then, but I hope it is readable :). Also, the blurb on that page is only relevant to the discussions that were happening at the moment, so don’t spend too much time on that.Ah, and the page is (still) here:http://dev.gentoo.org/~geor…And, get well!From what I could see in life, no matter what doctors tell, there is nothing (short of acute terminal condition, when you simply don’t have time for anything) that some regime change, (properly planned) excersize and (most importantly) keeping the right mood cannot fix.George
Oh, and for those interested, there is also A# :). I don’t know details, I just seem to remember it as a .net binding for Ada or some such.
Eh george, I sincerely thought it was like PASCAL 😛 That’s also coming from a person’s name, but it still gets capitalised 🙂 By the way, the post was actually written before talking with you ;)Tom, actually what I had was an event of acute pancreatitis.. the problem is that the doctors have no clue about what caused it. They have some theories, but they were also almost sure that I would have been diabetic when I got out of the hospital, while luckily for me I escaped that. But I admit I feel a bit less alone to know there are other people in similar conditions, although that is also sad.And for who’s concerned with Ciaranm’s comment: I told him I’m tired of his comments if they are not constructive, so no, I won’t think twice about removing them right away unless they make a decent sense for the context.