A (not so) brief timeline of my road to Lisp…
- 1988-89-ish As a young bookworm, discovered a book in the library on assembler programming after first computer lab class. Mucked around with Lisa assembler on uncle’s aging Apple IIe. Was most entertained by the graphics routines. Childhood attention span was short and interest waned fast.
- 1991 Computer lab at school introduced Logo. Much easier than graphics in assembler.
- 1992 Summer at my aunt’s always meant a weekly trip to the library. Found book on programming games in BASIC. Enthralled. Spent summer hacking my own version of mastermind and a really weak text adventure that took all of 10 minutes to finish after about a month of work. All clobbered together with conditionals, gotos, and print statements.
- 1996 Was making graphical games in BASIC by now (clones of the arcade classics essentially), but disappointed they never looked as good as the games I’d been playing on my NES and now SuperNES. Discovered C from some fellow programming enthusiasts I met on a BBS. Tried making a few games over the next couple years but only came up with a “Tanks” clone that had weapon powerups and selectable terrain.
- 1999 A friend introduces me to Linux, Perl, and MUDs. Really take to Perl for some reason. First programs were scripts to generate HTML files I would manually upload to whatever free geocities-clone I was using at the time. People would later call these, “blogs.” Made various other scripts and utilities for MUD’ing, galleries, blogs and the like. The freedom from static types and access to a proliferating library of free code was a total buzz.
- 2000 High school taught courses on OO-Turing and VB. Took them both. Took extra-curricular courses as well. More noodling with games and graphics. Teacher gave me free reign to learn whatever I wanted.
- 2004 Picked up PHP for a gig a friend got me into. Hadn’t done much programming in a few years while I attempted a career in music.
- Late 2004 Started learning Python after seeing some code on a forum. It would be a few years years of helper scripts and utilities before I’d land my first gig as a Python programmer and dump everything else.
- 2005 Tried getting into Ruby but it didn’t take. Then Rails came out. I was glad the concept of web frameworks was on its way to reaching a critical mass, but disappointed with the implementation in Rails.
- Late 2008 Had been bored with web development for some time, my side projects started veering into text and image analysis. Discussions on programming with a particularly stubborn yet intelligent individual always ended in, “Lisp.” I promptly decided I needed to know the truth. A couple weeks later and there was no spoon. There are no braces. Just Lisp.
I’m still very new to Lisp, but it has definitely got me really excited. The path to enlightenment and nirvana has finally been opened to me. Programming is fun again. And better.
I am a programmer and to some degree an artist, musician, and writer as well. My passion in life is learning — new languages, technologies, and ways of thinking. I created this blog to document my thoughts on various topics and my progress in my many pursuits. I hope that in doing so I may help someone along the way to learn something new as well.
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