Reports from 3AM, or: How I respond to a global financial crisis.
- Read lots about it, mostly on various websites and blogs, some of which sent to me by a friend who subscribes to this Austrian-school gold-bug mailing list and some of which are written by sane people.
- Internally adopt an attitude of high seriousness.
- Think really, really hard about it.
- Eventually remember that in the past this approach has worked for almost no problems at all.
- Even those problems over which I had any control.
Which is why I’m going on an economics news fast and teaching myself Haskell. Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation, and all that.
Nannygoat Hill 
Jinx: made the exact same resolution regarding the “crisis” myself. I realised that since professional macroeconomists have no idea what will happen or what to do about it, I had no place bothering to think on the subject any further.
Enjoy Haskell — I recommend the “Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours” tutorial if you haven’t seen it.
Thanks for the tip – it looks good. My rusty knowledge of Lisp is all that’s keeping me afloat in Haskell at the moment.
It’s making me like strong typing again, which is something I never thought I’d hear myself saying.
I learned about decent type inference from Haskell. It had never occurred to me before that a program should be able to analytically determine the type of pretty much all of its data with minimal notation required. It’s a lovely language, although I still find it impossible to do anything useful with it.
At my last job there was a guy who was into Functional Reactive Programming who had cloned Asteroids in Haskell — that was neat.
I’m going to buy “Real World Haskell” at some point and trudge through it searching for enlightenment.
I’ve been working my way through the online version for a week or so now. I feel like I’m getting some traction now – my solutions to the exercises are Just Working much earlier than is usual for me at this stage of learning a language.
I’m considering it something like an antidote to too many years of Perl and a substitute for Perl 6 (which has apparently nicked several ideas from it) – so even if I never use it for anything it will be worthwhile.
Forgot the link: RWH
The website allows reader comments on every paragraph, which is a strange way to experience a book, especially with an audience as nerdy as this. Oh the nits! Oh the picking!
Yeah, the open beta. I heard about that a while ago on Proggit. My opinion of books that beta on the web isn’t entirely positive … “Programming Clojure” is a bit of a mess, but then I don’t think the author is of the same calibre as the RWH mob.
I have had a look at RWH online, but I’d like to get the hard copy I think.
How long before you try reading a category theory paper or two then? Brain-bending stuff which I never recall ten minutes later.
Probably when I try to understand monads.
*cough* Heh. Actually, I think I understood monads once. There is a really good paper out there somewhere that explains, in a relatively readable manner albeit with plenty of carefully defined symbolism, the notion of a monad as a way of “evolving” a computation sequence subject to certain rules.
I found this paper a lot more insightful than the standard “well it’s a thingy with a thingy called ‘bind’ and a thingy called ‘return'” explanation. Wish I could remember the name / authors.