Language Envy

Every programming language community seems to have a subset of itself that is just overly concerned with envy for another language, whether it's the features or parts of the ecosystem. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's actually good when a good idea gets support in multiple languages. It's just interesting how narrow and repetitive the envy can be. (In some cases even incestuous -- JS framework envy leading to more and more JS frameworks.)

When Rails was hot, there was a lot of Rails envy (less Ruby envy). While I preferred Flask, Django wasn't bad, and made good effort at replicating the Rails experience. There were many PHP frameworks as well. In the Common Lisp world, there's been a bit of envy, and it's led to a few frameworks, but they're really not anywhere near supported as Rails or its imitators in other languages. What happens, given that CL is a small community, is that every so often someone new will get Rails envy, and instead of building on top of one of the existing frameworks, they'll make their own, and it too will not actually be where Rails is.

I've been seeing a lot of C envy in the Lisp world recently. I've even participated in some of it myself over the years... I mean, it's really cool that CL is both a super high and super low level language, that we can work with whatever high level abstractions and at the same time drop to machine code if needed. With SBCL, and sometimes a little elbow grease, we can have our cake and eat it too with the most dynamic language that nevertheless has amazing C (or better than C) speeds for things.

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Getting over someone sucks

It's not my first time, actually it's nothing new, but that doesn't make it any easier to get through

It's a pollutant of the mind. Frequent and daily thoughts about her and how I must be a terrible person, I must have done various missteps, some I can plausibly point to, some I have no idea about so always wondering whether such and such was a mistake, but if such and such other thing was then that's kind of unfair anyway to hate me for because in most contexts including that one it's fine but sure what the hell I'll take responsibility for them anyway. Self-blame is a game I don't mind even if it doesn't feel good.

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