I'm sure that rillian and a few others are probably chuckling, saying "I told you so" under their breaths, but here it is: I like Python 2.3. I really like it. If I had known that it was (in some senses) a stealth Lisp with infix notation and fewer parentheses, I might have given it more of a chance sooner. Instead, I bashed it mercilessly for having an exception dedicated to indentation errors.

In short, I now feel very foolish for judging a language by its exceptions.

Just resting. Many things going on in my life (check user kwoo on LiveJournal if you're interested), and very few have anything to do with coding.

Curses!

Actually, it's the lack of them that's driving me nuts -- namely, curses bindings for functional languages. I know that functional language purists scoff at such ideas, but I'm darn close to digging into O'Caml's FFI to make such a thing happen.

Barter and Blister are now officially dead. Major changes have gone on in my life, and I am left with no desire to finish them.

Major changes

I am now a resident of Hay River, NT, CA (formerly of Vancouver, BC, CA).

I am now focusing on the mathematical underpinnings of computing science and cryptography/cryptanalysis rather than writing yet-another-horrible-CGI-application.

I am no longer working with computers professionally. This may change, but for the moment, I am working in shipping/receiving at a local department store.

I am now focusing on Ruby and O'Caml, rather than Scheme, Smalltalk, Lisp, C, C++, Perl, Modula series, shell scripting, and the scads of other languages I've cycled through. These are the only interpreters/compiler that seem to work on all of the platforms and OSs that I do. I no longer give a rat's ass what anyone thinks about my choice of languages. I even wrote a prime number filtering program in Ruby. It's slow, but it does the trick. If I have a big prime, I'll just run it as I sleep. No biggie.

I am now impossible to find on IRC unless you know the two channels where I hang out (and the network those channels are on, for that matter). They are non-technical channels, so if you see me there, please don't ask for technical help. Do that through e-mail.

I no longer follow Usenet. I don't even think I can get access to it up here. If you're posting something you think I would like, please Bcc it. Even the comp.* hierarchy is driving me crazy these days.

I will only post things that are actually interesting to Advogato in the future. This message is not considered interesting, but rather is here to let the few that look know what's up.

SyntaxPolice: Haskell is one of those languages I've always wanted to get into (if for no other reason than to explore yet another functional language), but have never had the time. It does look pretty sweet, though!

Java

Okay, my certs and diary ranking are going to take a serious drop. I've started learning Java.

I contacted someone I used to work for at a local university, mostly to say hello and ask about possible positions at the company he's now with. It seems the company needs Java programmers. This is a trend I've noticed recently -- there seem to be more Java jobs than everything else combined in my area.

He pointed out that the development cycle at his company is very short, and that does not make for a good learn-on-the-job environment (for the company or for me, for that matter). But it did give me something to think about.

Vancouver is a sort of bass-ackwards city. The Java gold rush that has probably faded other places is still alive and well here. Since I can hardly get anyone to look at my resume without being a Java or Microsoft guru, I figure I'll take the lesser of the two evils.

That being said, does anyone know of a good resource that lists the differences between the 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 APIs? On my current most-used platform (Linux/PPC), I can only get access to 1.3.1, and it would be handy to know what I'm missing from the latest spec.

Also, a question to those who work in Java -- what are the things I should learn? Are Beans still being used? Is J2EE knowledge helpful, or should I put off learning it until I have to use it? How 'bout JSP? Servelets?

Thank you for reading this far. :)

SyntaxPolice: Thank you for the link! The link I was talking about was for another book on the subject. The two should complement each other, though.