LRN: APRIL 16-17, 2024
       
       
       
       
       Returning to the land of LISP
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       Yesterday, I sat down to start work again on my small home-IoT UDP
       protocol. I hadn't covered much ground in the work. I had boilerplate
       code mostly working with LuaSockets and LuaFileSystem. I had selected
       an appropriate version of Lua (5.2), and gotten its environment and
       modules setup. I had chosen Lua because of its beautiful, brief syntax
       and its elegant single datastructure, tables. Lua is one of my
       favorite languages. But I just couldn't get myself excited to use it
       for this project. For one: t can't do proper multithreading, far as I
       know. This means I would have to find clever ways to handle the many
       datagrams I expected to send from my devices. Anyways, I finally
       decided to move the project over to the Land of LISP.
       
       I love LISPs. My brain is so much more adept at working with conses,
       parens, and the functional style this family of languages is often
       know to embody. Around this time last I was covering lots of ground in
       my pursuit of CommonLisp by reading about ANSI CommonLisp and the
       CLOS. At some point it fizzled out, and I struggled against myself
       going back to it for some time. I don't know why. Maybe because it
       feels so niche.
       
       Anyways, yesterday I came to the conclusion that LISP will be my focus
       for some time. If I need something done, I'm going to write it in a
       LISP. I am just so tired of popular, ugly languages like Python, which
       portend to be a swiss army knife when in fact it is a bunch of garbage
       heaped together looking like modern art. LISP is a happy place for
       me. CommonLisp especially, which I have working with Emacs and SBCL
       immediately flawlessly.
       
       Today I got a late start to my studies--I glanced over the `usocket'
       library. So not much progress to my learning goals. But I reckon
       having come to a singular familiar focus for the structure and
       expression of my keystrokes will prove nourishing.
       
       LISP!