You know how it is. Slogging names like SomethingReallyLongWithItsTypeAtTheEndDialog. Groveling through docs endlessly while trying to remember how to make the widget work right, but the names and the choices are so similar, you have to try a bunch of them before figuring out the right one, which might turn out to be the wrong one for some configuration or target system, but the docs are so light and confusing, they don't tell you that, you have to find out for yourself while the pressures of life squeeze like a vice and HURRY UP AND SHIP IT is all anybody ever says to you along with I THOUGHT YOU WERE DONE?! Madness. As if that's not enough, endlessly waiting for the build to finish and launch before you can agonize over the slow-motion rumblings of a debugger spitting out insane volumes of meaningless crap for an indication of what really went wrong that got set to null for you to find like buried treasure somewhere up there after scrolling around. Again. And again.
I wrestled with a simple math problem in Java for a while yesterday. For far longer than it should have taken. I was progressively more sure my brain injury was slowing me down. Or I did think it, because I couldn't believe I couldn't solve a simple trigonometry problem involving a handful of variables. I spun over it in Java, editing, thinking, compiling, waiting, building, testing as time flew by. I started thinking I needed to get out of programming and accept I was old, broken, and rapidly losing intelligence and vitality. I paced the room waving my hands as each held variables and my mind creaked and groaned under the strain and I felt the desire to overcome a simple problem rapidly diminishing. I never quit, but quit was all I heard in my head, screaming like a Siren into every fiber that was me. I was almost seduced, but then I remembered...Lisp.
I fired up Clisp. I wrote an equation and fed it variables. Then, I wrote a loop with an equation and the output got me... thinking. Where my mind had been a wildly vibrating pile of gelatin about to implode only minutes earlier, it was suddenly calm, focused, and coming to life. In two minutes I had carefully considered each step, then prototyped, considered some more, realized, and, eureka, solved what took hours to only confound me in Java.
For a moment, life was good again.
One day, I hope to be able to go forward into Lisp for good and the onto construction of some of these crazy ideas I have, and not get dragged into hell and halfway back to C++ ever again. Amen.
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