Hard labor

I had a dumb argument recently with my dad's wife, it was around various aspects of illegal alien workers. One of the retorts against me was something like "You have no idea how hard they work", to which my knee-jerk reply was something like "I've done hard labor" and her reply was a "When have you ever? *laughs*".

It's mostly fair in the sense of criticism against me that, especially as an adult, I live a soft life. (I know very well she thinks quite poorly of me in multiple ways, most of them unfair and ignorant, some of them fair.) But that's not really valid as an argument for anything. I readily conceded that no, I haven't done hard labor in any full time capacity. Or even part time job capacity. I've not harvested sugar cane or cotton or worked on a farm for money or on a crabbing ship or in a coal mine. I can only imagine how difficult it must be through others' reports and however much I can extrapolate from my own experiences.

Nevertheless I think some of those experiences count as hard labor. But perhaps it's just sparkling labor, and true hard labor can only be experienced if you're forced to work in near slave conditions for a long duration. (The slavery aspect is part of my arguments around the issue of illegal aliens, but it is also admittedly rhetorically over the top, but I don't think by that much. As an imported underclass they lack so many protections and opportunities that legal immigrants and citizens enjoy, and are frequently exploited on that basis, so for many it's not that much higher than slavery. Some slave owners treated their slaves well, too.)

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The futility of one million words

I've had a word count tracker for this site for quite some time. It's nothing special, just counts every "word" in posts and in comments by me, defining word as a string of symbols not including a space. A bit of logic filters out quote blocks or code blocks. (I had previously forgotten to filter code blocks, but duplicated the logic for span blocks so that should be good now...) Some quotes/code blocks probably should be counted (I think there might be some cringe poetry in pre tags...) but whatever, accurate enough.

As of today, ignoring this post, there are 482,117 words.

In 2021 I decided to count how many words would be added if I added up my HN comments, which is the other place I write the most at. That gave me another 400,000+ words, naively counted with wc -w, essentially the same logic as for my blog. Though some of those words are also quotes from others, or code, and I didn't try filtering them out. And every comment is separated by a bunch of dashes and wc counts those as words too, adding one extra word per post. In other words, it's an overestimate.

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Briefly revisiting Land of Lisp

A couple months ago I was surprised to read in a couple places that the book Land of Lisp was "much maligned". This was surprising because it has high reviews on Amazon and GoodReads, and I personally liked it overall too. I remember getting it not long after it came out, Christmas of 2010, but I didn't really make time to read it much. I was busy with college and my job, and at some point I got more hooked on Clojure and didn't want to look at things through the "old and crufty" CL lens. I wish I kept track better of my progress milestones. I remember going through a section of it years later with my cat occasionally resting on a page. For various outside the book reasons though I just didn't get around to making the final push to finish it until 2018.

I had one major critique, which was the author seems to have a stylistic preference that I don't share. Namely, his Lisp code is more "Scheme-like" than Common Lisp-like, and more emphasizes functional programming (mostly in the closures + higher order functions sense, not so much the immutability sense, and ignores the static typing sense). To quote from my own thoughts after reading that I still agree with:

The main critique I'd offer would be that perhaps functional style was emphasized too much, much of the code felt like what I'd expect to see if a Scheme or Clojure programmer was forced to write in Common Lisp. (So it didn't actually feel "sticky" to the brain and writing Lisp afterwards I still look basic things up.) Specifically, the over-frequent use of inner functions via 'labels for closure benefits rather than separate helper functions with a couple extra params (or generic methods on objects...), recursion (and often not tail-recursion) instead of various looping facilities, and raw car/cdr and their (admittedly useful) mutant forms rather than some structs or CLOS objects to help hide that. I just can't remember that the caddr of our "data structure" is always some particular thing, I'd like a get-thing that does the caadr/caddr/whatdr.

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