Needing a break from all the "fun" I'm having with mathematics and programming, I figured I would browse with the old search engine for some wholesome negativity or at least some comic relief or blasphemy.
This gave me a little chuckle, I guess:
Python
Do you have permission from Your Leader to read this blog? Python is like the Scientology of Programming Languages. Everything has to be done the way the Prophet said. Or we are going to frown at you.
Look at us! We run a cult, and pretend it’s a programming language.
From
Your Favorite Programming Language SucksOf course, I can sympathize with how disgusted one can become when faced with such diversity. This is why I don't waste too much energy exploring. I was impressed with Python and, deep down in my guts, I am dedicated to continue to explore C++, although, since we only have a finite amount of time and energy, I mostly focus on mathematical concepts, and only on a limited area of mathematics ...
I am delighted when I stumble upon a text where the author focuses on some of the things I am interested in. This allows me to enjoy the learning process. If I can just stay interested, I can block out the stuff I don't want to think about. Scheinerman's C++ For Mathematicians is a good example of a fun book for me. Early on he gets into greatest common divisor, and now, early in chapter 5, he is getting into some code on factoring numbers and storing the factors into an array of primes. This is what I was into in 1999.
That's when I was having fun learning, and I used the little bit I knew to investigate things that were not even remotely covered in the official labs and projects. Scheinerman is a mathematician writing for mathematics students, and I really appreciate (dig?) his approach, possibly because I consider myself a perpetual student.
You see, I don't know what I am. I'm some kind of chimpanzee, I know that. Also, seeing as I am not keen on propagating my genetic code, I presume I have been targeted for biological extinction.
It's quite bizarre.
cul-de-sacThere is too much "out there" ... one has to focus, to perform the Husserlian phenomenological epoche to bracket out the so-called Big Bad World that puffs itself up into significance, always competing for the attention of the laser beam of consciousness
... I am just now amping myself up to study 64-bit Assembly programming for Linux, and I don't want to be distracted by some obscure operating system like
Inferno.
I guess there is some kind of method to my madness. The way I see it, I was so impressed with the computer algebra systems written in python, including Sage and SymPy, as well as others like GAP, that I started to daydream of a day when I could build a little personal CAS with a "classical" language like C++. Even if I never build it, the thing that is motivating me has some momentum to it. It's as though there were a presence within me that has been in chains ... and it wonders how long it will be able to explore ... before it is once again entrapped, encaged, neutralized ... At this point I kind of get the joke, the fact that nothing leads anywhere, and that there is no satisfaction to be had. I get it. So, little moments of inner transformation through subtle understandings is as good as it gets. OK.
Of course, I can't live for any destinations, but can only exist in the passing moments, the passing evenings and mornings. Do I enjoy this? Is this what my brain goes about doing when I do not drown it in alcohol?
I suppose that, as long as I am in a stable state of mind, there is nothing pathological about stretching one's brain to study things others consider difficult. Myself, I stay away from things that seem totally incomprehensible, but I can wrap my mind around quite a bit of what I have chosen to study.
I won't be the one to knock down what so many others choose to focus on. I just happen to be one who doesn't care about video games or telephones. I'm not even too interested in databases or website development. Look at me. I am content to use a basic free message board, and this only because someone chose to confide in me that he was kind of fascinated with my rhetoric, rhetoric that several people have suggested I tone down.
So, since I am neither a professional programmer nor an academic mathematician, I do not presume to write as though I have mastered anything whatsoever. I'm just a chimpanzee who can read, write, and do a little math. How do I get my kicks? Well, I used to get a bottle of booze, crank up the music, and babble into a recorder. I would walk under the moon and howl.
Now the wild creature has been somewhat subdued ... and I find that the seeds of intellectual curiosity are not completely sterile. As an adult male, there seems something quite odd about studying programming and mathematics for fun. People assume that, if one never landed a job having to do with what they studied, this represents a failure. Myself, I lost interest in most all types of employment. Did the silicon chip inside my head get switched to over-load?
There doesn't seem to be anything for me to do on this earth. It's all some kind of hoax, a failed mutation ... Nature's cul-de-sac ... and yet I still find prime factorization interesting? What makes it more interesting when writing the instructions so as to be able to command a computer to perform the calculations?
It is what it is. I must be a member of some secret cult that is so secret that it's members don't even know they are in it.

Maybe I have been "called" to be a fringe member of something like a Stepanov cult ... Instead of religious wars between competing fanatics, there will be intellectual wars between Javaists and C++STLians ... Pythonic evangelists ... NO, we can't get along.
F--- video games and those who write the gaming code. I get my kicks factoring primes and reiterating the Chinese Remainder Theorem. My idea of revolution is studying for sheer intellectual stimulation.
As the chief proponent of Java at SGI told me: “Alex, you have to go where the money is.” But I do not particularly want to go where the money is – it usually does not smell nice there. ~ Alexander Stepanov
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