Time for a refresh

I am starting to think of refresh of this blog. I been hating talking about things I might do, but I am trying to persist in maintaining myself in things even if I start waning in interest. [1] The sense of defeat is annoying. I can't talk about everything I do, because that's boring, but I can think a little more.

However ...

I haven't done much technical stuff lately, but started to pick up Lisps, Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp in particular. I have always been hesitant on them:

1. I thought CL was too big. Also, I definitely can't get a job in it, unless it is in some place where they do really really really smart things,
2. I think Emacs Lisp feels all over the place. Maybe I don't give credit where credit is due ...

The fact is that even just Emacs and it's Lisp is probably more important to my day-to-day work than I have ever let on. I just always struggled to learn it. But after the experience of writing my own init file (being handheld with tutorials) and a want to fix some workflows, maybe my spirit is changing.

Languages need to have a unique edge and be useful to make it worth it for me to spend time. For all the Rust hype, I ain't interested. Lisp, however, is interesting. Interesting because it has a practical rationale for what I use. REPL-driven development, with that super-fast feedback loop without even to have anything other than the interpreter on to do everything (trying, debugging, updating, tweaking) is fascinating. I have to learn more, but I am optimistic.

I think my first target would be to rewrite the software I wrote to generate this site, but with an emphasis on an Emacs workflow - because I want that. I want to do a keybinding now to push this, but I can't! I also forgot about my own little Twitter/X :D I also had the idea of a very light Ansible-like software, improving on what I wrote in bash a month ago. We'll see.

I have been reading randomly about both Lisps. During th Christmas break, I have been reading:

1. On Lisp by Paul Graham: https://paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html . More leaning on theory, but so far has been useful to see the forest from the trees on why to use Lisp
2. Practical Common Lisp: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/ . It is more practical :)
3. CL Cookbook https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/
4. Emacs Lisp videos on YouTube from System Crafters: https://www.youtube.com/@SystemCrafters. He's a better start than Emacs docs :)
5. Stuff about SLY (fork of SLIME, for CL development in Emacs). SLY makes writing and debugging code totally different than other IDEs. The emphasis is on the running system and writing things piecewise, one of the alluring aspects to this.

I am going to make it a point to find more Lisp-related topics to present. This started because I got interested in some project in CL, mentioned it to a co-worker and ended up doing a presentation on it. Lisps are not "exciting" in the market, but maybe that's the point here? Not market excitement, but excitement towards old but novel tools? Sad to admit that at this point, I am starting to see Lisp in every tool I use Where were you all my life? :D

---

[1] One thing is reading the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. It might be slow to read through, it can be and should be enlightening. (Yes, it should be.)