MudLog

I probably spend more time writing code than anything else during a typical day. Since I started joined the Lab in June, I have gone in every day (except for the day we went to New York to see Tufte) and spent time programming.

It’s a little odd. I hated programming. I thought it was useful, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I love computers, but I use computers to make visual things, not to write programs. In undergrad, I avoided programming at all cost. I never took a computer science class. I was a physics snob, and I viewed people in computer science to be future programming robots – great hackers were all burnout physics majors anyway! At some point I started liking programming, but I forgot when that happened.

Perhaps it’s the lack CS classes, but I always thought programming was just a tool and was never curious about why certain programming languages are the way they are. However, since spending the whole summer hacking away at Ruby and JavaScript, I got curious as to how and why the two are so different.

Ruby, much like Java is a class-based object oriented language where objects are created by instantiating a class, whereas JavaScript is prototype-based and objects are created by copying the prototype. I’m reading Prototype-based Programming and beginning to appreciate the flexibilities offered by JavaScript. Maybe there’s a reason why many applications which provide scripting layers use JavaScript. It’s also interesting to see that JavaScript has a lot in common with Scheme if you take away the syntactic differences. This means you should be spending more time hacking with JavaScript!

Off to decide what classes I should take this term…now that I think about it, I probably spend more time daydreaming.