Odds and Sods

What the ****!  I started this blog thinking I would be speaking to maybe a dozen people.  At the weekend I posted my usual grumbles about the general lack of appreciation for my favourite programming language Tcl.  My former colleagues at Bloomberg must have been fed up of hearing me repeating this stuff.  Anyway, someone I don't know linked my post on "Hacker News" and 24 hours later it had 15000 views😵.  Any time my ego needs a boost I can reread this comment!

Trying to improve your mood by thinking about it can seem rather like trying to make your car move by pushing on the dashboard (a phrase I read recently in a completely different context).  Just getting out for a walk can be much more effective.  And it turns out that walking around my area High Barnet is so interesting they made a film about it - see trailer at 23 Walks, also background info.  Most of the locations in the trailer are extremely familiar to me, even the council office which appears briefly looks like one my wife and I have visited several times for meetings with social services about our son's care.

But isn't it about time the scriptwriters for the dystopian future drama we seem to be living in decided to lighten up a bit?  Surely it was enough to have half the world ruled by mad dictators and would-be dictators, impending environmental catastrophe, the UK tearing itself apart, without adding a world-wide killer virus on top as well?  Perhaps in the next episode Stephen Pinker will assure us that all is well?

Some handy points I picked up from Pinker's book How the Mind Works, paraphrased somewhat:

• Love is the state of mind where the well-being of another person becomes as important as your own (not very romantic, but it works for me).
• The conflict between logic and emotion is bogus, because logic tells you how to do things but not what to do, while emotion tells you what to do but not how to achieve it (in theory of course, in practice this conflict still often seems problematic).
• It's really not surprising that human beings can be obsessive and/or highly sensitive about almost anything even remotely related to sex.  For the "selfish genes" which ultimately shape our behaviour, whether and with whom we have sex is quite literally a matter of life or death, determining which of those genes live on in the next generation.

The "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude has a lot to answer for 😕.  Of course if you're in the middle of a crisis, you have to focus on the immediate practicalities of the situation and emotional reactions may be luxuries you can't afford.  But ignoring these upsets doesn't necessarily mean they go away.  In computing terms, the various alarm signals that go off are flagged as high priority, so if they can't be handled at the time they get queued for later processing.  If the crisis is intense or prolonged (such as struggling to care for a disabled family member in parallel with a demanding job), it may never be possible to process this queue.  But it's also never possible to entirely ignore it and if the queue of deferred alerts continues to build up, its pressure will eventually start to disrupt one's normal functioning.  So for the benefit of one's long-term mental health, a better policy may be the classic "When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" 😲.

I used to be rather dubious about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.  But after following reports of his recent extradition hearings, e.g. from the Independent, the indefatigable Craig Murray, etc., I have started to think that he is being "railroaded" for the crime of shining a light into dark places.  Also since I tend to get most of my news from the Guardian, I am seriously disturbed by the allegation that the Guardian betrayed Assange after getting a lot of copy out of his earlier revelations.

Finally, since 40+ years ago I was diagnosed as having a schizoid personality, I leave you with the appropriate theme music.

Why I'm Tcl-ish

I'm a big fan of programming in Tcl, the "Tool Command Language", although it is distinctly out-of-fashion these days.  When I have the freedom to choose, I tend to use Tcl for anything that doesn't need to run at maximum possible speed (and probably C++ for anything that does).

One of my colleagues at Bloomberg once asked when I would give up writing utilities in such an ancient language as Tcl and update myself to something more contemporary like Python.  I should perhaps have replied "I find your lack of faith disturbing" but I just said something lame to the effect that such an "update" would make me less productive 😉.

Over my 47-year involvement with computing, at various times I have been enthusiastic about several different programming languages:

• St. Andrews Static Language - the first practical implementation of a pure functional programming language anywhere, which I just happened to get the chance to use in 1975-6.
• Modula-2 - a very clean, predictable, understandable conventional algorithmic language.
• Prolog - the classic PROgramming in LOGic language, yet another fundamentally different yet consistent paradigm.
  
• Perl - quite the opposite of all the above, a very "hacky" language based on practicality not purity, great for solving certain types of problems quickly, but really not scaling up nicely at all.
  
• Tcl - "Tool Command Language", for me this hits the "sweet spot" between all of the above.
  

Programmers who like Tcl tend to think of it as being clean, logical and consistent.  However the majority tend to reject it, complaining about "quoting hell" and various awkwardnesses which basically come down to it being too different from what they are used to.  Really Tcl has a radical minimalism which makes it genuinely different from the common patterns that most programming languages follow.

Most programming languages blend syntax and semantics.  Each language construct (e.g. if-then-else for conditional execution) has individual rules for how it is written (syntax) and how it operates (semantics).  The language definition as a whole includes all of these specific elements of syntax and semantics.

In contrast, the essence of Tcl is a very small and simple core which defines only how to define and use variables, data values, commands in general, and events.  The only syntactic rules are those which define how to invoke a generic command and pass data to and from it.  These are documented at man Tcl, there is no special syntax for specific commands.  All functionality is defined as the semantics of individual commands.  Flow control is done by commands which take other commands as their arguments.  So if-then-else functionality is provided by a command called "if" whose arguments are the condition to test, the code to execute when the condition is true, and optionally the code to execute when the condition is false.

This design can be cumbersome in some ways.  For example, the core has no syntax for arithmetic expressions, this is delegated to the command expr, which the programmer has to explicitly invoke in various places where some calculation is needed.

However this division of concerns creates a unique flexibility.  Commands can be created or redefined on-the-fly. To give an extreme example, it's perfectly possible to redefine the "if" command to reverse its logic.  More constructively, before Tcl added built-in commands for object-oriented programming, many people exploited the language's flexibility to make their own support for object-orientation.

I suspect this modular design has also enabled Tcl to evolve more smoothly.  Since it was originally designed, Tcl has incorporated many innovations (caching of optimised internal representations for code and data; unicode support; multi-threading; coroutines; fully-virtualised filesystem operations; decoupling of versioning for language extensions, etc.) with almost no disruption for existing running code, something which Python still struggles with.

I should say that Lisp has many of the same attributes that I'm claiming for Tcl.  One difference is that historically, Lisp systems tended to be conceived of as a universe of their own, with little regard for interoperation with anything else.  Tcl on the other hand started life as an extension language intended to be embedded in other software, and so has strong support for integrating with other systems on multiple levels.

Finally we have the cross-platform GUI (Graphical User Interface) support provided by Tk.  This can be used from other languages, but is most closely integrated with Tcl.  For an example of the kind of handy but lightweight tools that can easily be put together with the Tcl/Tk combination, see Diskusage.

A few older photos

 

Me at Isle of Wight last year

John at Isle of Wight last year

A slice cut through the clouds over High Barnet

The Mimmshall Brook

Raiders of the lost cause ;-)

Shoeburyness looking Southwest

Shoeburyness looking Southeast

Autumn leaves at Ravenscroft Park

"Still Crazy After All These Years"

The relevant song can be found at Still Crazy After All These Years.  To keep doing the same thing but expecting a different result is popularly described as a sign of madness.

Each time I am asked to accompany my wife Eleni to a meeting about our son John's care/education/welfare etc., I think this time could be different. Perhaps we will have a rational, respectful discussion where I will be able to make some constructive contribution. But most often, sooner or later it turns into quite the opposite. This make me feel as if I'm being subjected to some fiendish kind of torture that make me want to start screaming. Then afterwards it takes me 3 or 4 days to get back to some kind of balance where I can get on with the rest of life. When you feel like you are banging your head against a wall, doesn't it make sense to just stop?

A few recent photos

 My son John:

John at his house with his Ipad

John celebrating his 23rd birthday

A couple of pictures taken from the Bloomberg office early one morning before the lockdown:

Looking West to St. Pauls

Looking East towards the Mansion House

Last visit to the Bloomberg office to clear out my desk:

Entrance and St. Stephens

Strangely empty desk in a strangely empty office

Me outside

Me and Eleni outside