Because of the lack of l33t h4x0rz at my current place of employment, I have taken to reading the books and essays of people who have the same inner need for creativity. I stumbled across an essay called "
Teach Youself Programming in Ten Years" and somehow made my way to
Hackers and Painters, which I'd skimmed before. (That link is to an essay form, but there is a full fledged
book.) The book is also available through Oreilly's
Safari bookshelf thing, which rocks.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I put a certain Debian-related (Linux) distro on my laptop a number of weeks ago after feeling like something was missing. A proper JRE, Eclipse, Python(s), MySQL, Apache httpd, Tomcat, hex editor, etc...
I messed around for a while writing a bunch of utils and the like, including some bootstrap-type tools that do the "I'm tired of coding this every time I start a new project" kind of work for me in a way that is more succinct and elegant. When I did this, I noticed that what I was doing was text crunching and parsing and making lots of lists of things. Not really a revolutionary revelation, but that, plus the H&P book in the back of my mind, means the next thing I added was Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) and Cusp (Eclipse SBCL-friendly plugin). I'm trying to get that up and running as I type. After a few false starts with wrong versions, misleading installation instructions, files in the wrong places, etc, I think I am on the right track. About to get to the make-or-break point. Will it make, or break?
It breaks. Hmmm.