The Fourth Virtue – Virtuous Programmer 6

Like his language, Larry’s virtuous programmer needs an upgrade.Apart from laziness,impatience and hubris, a good programmer should inculcate a fourth virtue – Infidelity. Infidelity towards one’s favourite programming language. One should not be too faithful when it comes to programming languages.(To use a possible mixed metaphor, you can roughly translate it as ”Thou shalt covet thy neighbour’s language”. )
  I wasn’t always like this. I was brought up on the shores of C where the C God was revered.There was no other God but the C God. And I was fairly happy structuring (and even object-orienting) and building my little sand-castles using those asterisks and ampersands – generally from scratch. Every one around me were honest, hard-working fishermen endowed with enormous patience and rippling muscles. I was fairly skillfull with my asterisk and was taught to always clean up after am done using it  – I was proud of many such good habits the religion gave me.
 Then Java came to our scene. Like a five-star sea-front resort. With a bunch of promises – platform independance, of automatic memory management and a monopoly on the ‘internet-ional’ market.
 Although there was some initial suspicion, it was tough not to get curious about it. Sure enough, the platform independance was the real thing, there were applets, there was swing, there was networking on a totally different level, and many more. And there were no core dumps. That you don’t have to clean the mess you created did not seem that bad a habit, after all. I was soon a convert. I swore in the name of Its Holiness ,The Java Virtual Machine. I got into ecstasy everytime I wrote a class loader. Every sunday I went to church to listen to the Gang of four and their design patterns.I sincerely believed that the path to heaven was paved with eclipse plugins, byte-code engineering (asm), classloaders, aspectjs, springs, PMDs and Jameleons.
 However, all along, I indulged in perl – but it wasn’t a religion per se. I thought every one who believed in God should know how to sing in perl, so that you can actively participate in the bhajans, keertans and the choir group. I did come across some artistes par excellence who were deeply religious about Perl itself, but I believed in only the Java God and did not give perl the status of religion. However I was faithful enough about it to not to go anywhere near the Python.
   I was leading such a religious and serene life when I suddenly came  to know about this enlightened one, from Japan – Ruby.It seemed as if, Bodhidharma came to west from the east, this time.Ruby is a bubbly, charming, youthful, friendly and a humourous zen master who seemed to have an answer for every thing. He was born in Japan but seemed to have seen a lot of world already and he’s well versed in english and computer science. And is he able? Man, He could do everything a perl programmer could do – only more elegantly. And when it comes to sophistication, even Java paled before him, one has to admit. There are already a lot of people who hang around him and who consider him to be the greatest God. But he definitely seems to be one guy who should not be judged by the company he keeps. The only trouble was that, the more you interact with this guy,even on a friendly level, the farther you go astray from the Java God. Religion start looking like a foolish sentiment.
 One day curiosity got the better of me, and I went to meet Ruby’s parents. His father , Mr SmallTalk, was an articulate, expressive, strong, principled and talented man who should have been a lot more famous than what he is. Probably he should have talked more.
  However, it is his mother’s side that am currently obsessed with.Ruby’s mother, Lady Lisp is an elegant, rich and a very creative Goddess. Although a tad old, she is very active and has quite a few talented devotees. And she has a whole bunch of close and not-so-close cousins. Each of them is a very beautiful, skillful, talented, lovely goddess worth dying for. After a few fumbling, but nevertheless paradigm-shifting, interactions with these lovely ladies,the light dawned on me. Infidelity is a virtue.If you are too religious about your God, you may end up mastering pointer arithmetic or design patterns or GC options but may miss out on lambda calculus , Left recursion, parser combinators, side-effects.There are quite a few things a real programmer should well be aware of. (Perhaps, it gotta be: “Should be well aware of”.)

Object Oriented Programming (and imperative programming) is just one side of the story. On the other side of this yang, there’s the lovely Yin too – the functional programming. And both Yin and Yang are integral part of the great Tao.
This site talks about my attempts at wooing some of the angels among the languages – Haskell, OCaml , Scheme, Scala and Forth – each with more Yin than Yang about them.Especially Haskell. She is pure Yin. And consequently the toughest to court. She falls for you pretty easily, if you are a PhD in computer science and if you have an especially strong fetish for obscure theories of mathematics. I am severely lacking in both these aspects, but I will try to overcome it with determination. Like all determined efforts do, this one’s going to look ugly. But who cares?. Once she’s mine, the others aren’t  going to be tough to get hold of. Be fore warned though. Am no natural cassanova.My attempts are bound to have more than a touch of gaucherie about them.

From my next post onwards, I will try to solve a set of problems in Haskell. Assuming I survive the ordeal, I will then attempt the same problems in OCaml,and then in Scheme, and may be in Forth too but finally in Scala. (I have a feeling that I might eventually settle down with scala but the path am choosing is probably necessary if I have to do full justice to all the features available in Scala). The  idea of this blog is to consider problems belonging to different areas of programming: parsing, string manipulation, numerical programs, web applications and ,hopefully,some aspects of parallel programming too.
Come by again in a short while,to see a few programs on haskell (there wont be too much of nonsense. That I promise.)

Tags: haskell, scala, tao