Hello, loves!

I have two items in my queue and I don’t think I can address them in parallel. What shall I do? Contains brief LLM-AI slur. May contain footnotes.

I enjoy programming in the classic form, where you do it with your own brain and fingers, not using some assemblage of oligarchy-serving book-burning job-stealing planet-destroying computer programs that can’t even enjoy what they’re doing.

In those days we kept an opcode cue card in our pocket protector. It was the style at the time1. Kids these days don’t get it.

And I enjoy writing about it as I do it, which has never been the style as far as I know. The style, if you were going to write at all, was more to work on the code until it was as perfect as it could be, and then write it up as if you were actually so smart that this perfect code just sprang all of a piece from your forehead, like Athena fully formed and fully armed springing from the skull of Zeus. Fortunately, such authors didn’t bother to split open their skull, which may have been the origin of the term “splitting headache”, but I digress.

I like to write as I go, sharing as much of my thought process as I can get down on in words. I do this mostly because it has become a habit, but I tell myself that I do it in case some reader somewhere might someday get a glimmer of an idea from what I think / say / do.

But there is a programming problem, an interesting one, that I want to address. But I can’t write about it as Ron Jeffries, for reasons2. So working the new problem will interfere with my standard morning of sitting down with some random on-going program, currently the dungeon, and coding something up and writing about it, sharing it with the six people who are known to read these articles, g*d knows why3.

I’m not sure how to balance the dungeon and the other problem, how to manage the writing bit, even how to switch mental context between two very different problems, two different languages, and three different editors4.

I don’t think switching between AM and PM will do it for me, though I’ll try that first. Maybe a couple of days on one and a couple on the other? That should really foul up the keystroke memory and whether to type a dot or a colon5.

I’ll figure out something. My mornings entertain me, and I hope they somewhat entertain a few other folks.

Oh, and if in fact you do read these and you do enjoy them, please drop me an email or a toot. If the count drops to zero I might stop. Might6.


  1. The onion thing was earlier. Not sorry I missed it. ↩

  2. As has long been suspected, ‘Ron Jeffries’ is just one of my identities7. I have a secret identity8, kind of like Spiderman or that dude with the cave9. ↩

  3. People sometimes wonder why I generally type g*d. It’s an affectation. cf. YHWH. In my case I just don’t want any possibly supernatural beings paying much attention to me. No sense asking for trouble. ↩

  4. Sublime Text, PyCharm, VS Code. ↩

  5. That’s a clue. There is another. ↩

  6. Probably won’t. ↩

  7. No, I am not in witness protection10. ↩

  8. And I want it to stay that way, so if you think you know11, please contact me privately12. ↩

  9. That dude is b*tsh*t crazy. If I had his money I could do better with it, you can be sure of that. ↩

  10. I’m not even a criminal13. ↩

  11. No, it’s not Kate Oneal. She’s real, at least in my mind14. ↩

  12. Anyway, you’re wrong, that’s not me. ↩

  13. OK, sometimes maybe I used to drive too fast. Misdemeanor15 at worst. ↩

  14. If in fact he is in his right mind. ↩

  15. OK, one time in my youth a ticked-off off-duty police officer did write me up for willful reckless driving but the fact that I made all the lights all the way downtown made it clear that I wasn’t even driving over the speed limit. Helps to be a math major. ↩