Paul is currently being a lame-o and working on a different project. But it's in Python, so apparently learning it worked!

Variations on the curly bracket

I've been experimenting with exorcising the curly bracket, which, uh, bothers me somewhat. I've been coding in Envy Code R and Inconsolata, whose curly brackets I've been tweaking in FontForge.

Here are some renderings of the variations I've tried out:

Inconsolata, unmodified:



Envy Code R, with my first variation:



Inconsolata, with my second variation:



Inconsolata, with my current variation:



None of these completely satisfies me, but I feel like I'm making some progress. (Anyone with actual experience with type will probably tear me to pieces for these.) It's amazing how much room there is for variation with that one stupid character.

Programming by not programming

My other project, the one that has put this one on hold (or perhaps just intense slow motion), is going along fine. Or so I think. My collaborator and I seem to have a rather nice collection of bits and pieces that we're slowly integrating in the direction of a useful application. The thing is, I don't seem to remember working on it. I've touched a little bit of Python that uses web.py, but mostly I've just been fiddling with CSS (which I don't really know), and looking at graphs in R (which I also really don't know).

For example, I'm not even really sure why the first little bit of AJAX stuff that I did started working because I didn't know why it wasn't working in the first place. But there are so few moving parts that I'm not too worried about it being fragile. If necessary, we could rewrite it, and it wouldn't take too long. In fact, there just isn't that much code. We've been spending most of our time discussing minutiae. That's a good thing, though, because it kept us from coding, and code is a liability. Not only did it not take us too long to get here, but we also aren't carrying the weight of a huge and complicated codebase, just a scattering of parts and some baling wire that we're slowly working with.

Getting further distracted: R

Well, I'm going further off track, but it's an interesting track. I'm now (again for outside reasons) learning R. It's a language made for mathematics and statistics, and, having seen someone who knows what he's doing operate it, I'm very impressed with its tools for succinctly exploring data. It's an interactive language, so the focus is a bit different, but it's apparently got most of the nice functional features that I'm learning to know and love. Also: it's very vector-oriented, with lots of tools to create and manipulate vectors. In fact, I'm pretty sure there's just no distinction between a number and a one-element numerical vector:

> 4 == 4
[1] TRUE
> 4 == c(4)
[1] TRUE
> 4 == c(4, 5)
[1]  TRUE FALSE

It'll be an interesting world to live in.

Frameworks

I'm working on two things in Python right now, a simple physics-based game, and a frontend for a web application (the later is part of an unrelated project that just seemed best to do in Python). I'm using pygame and web.py respectively. From my limited experience, I'm very impressed by both. The main way that I measure my impressedness is that I keep on getting stuck on problems that are actually hard problems in the things I'm trying to write. In fact, it's kind of frustrating, because I'm just jumping from problem to problem as I start to lay out my programs, with only occasional breaks for figuring out how the framework works.

Moving off the schedule

Well, I've really been neglecting Python. This season turns out to be kinda hectic, which I incorrectly figured that I could absorb with my slack more easily. So I'm dropping the 16 days on/7 days off schedule so I can give these languages the attention they deserve. My XO is coming with me on vacation, and I'll see if I can work on Python some over the next week.

It's a shame because I'm usually rather deadline-motivated, so this will make everything take longer. Oh well.