NullPointerFactory

Remember that moment in The Sound of Music where Captain Von Trapp first joins in singing with his children? That instant when he realizes just how much he’s been missing, and suddenly it all comes back? I had one of those moments at the No Fluff Just Stuff in Boston a couple of days ago…

It was during Neal Ford’s presentation on patterns in dynamic languages… I remembered my Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs class… you know, the one in Scheme/Lisp with the wizard book? I thought of the time when we studied the metacircular evaluators and compilers and realized that since then (certainly since I graduated college), I’ve never had to twist my brain into such fine knots to wrap around a new paradigm. Sure, there’s always a challenge - how to best model and design a solution, but never such a fundamental shift… And now, seeing classes that morph and expand themselves, a simultaneous celebration and violation of object-oriented thought… it was like a reunion with my long-lost wizard friends.

I’m not about to become a Ruby convert. I believe static typing is an essential feature and should be sacrificed only when the resulting gains are truly substantial (Ted Neward, another excellent speaker from the NFJS circuit, agrees). It’s the different thought process that made my day. After my one semester with the wizards, I went back to learning and thinking in Java, wondering oh-so-briefly why it didn’t let me pass functions to functions. Soon I stopped wondering and life moved on. I ended up in a cerebral rut… Even living up by the Pragmatic Programmers’ “learn a new language each year” rule, I was learning another syntax with cool features nothing more… Even discovering closures in Groovy and and delegates in C# was not quite all that big, because features alone only stretch one’s knowledge. Ideas stretch one’s thinking.

It’s hard to get out of a rut when you’re in one… (A) because you may not realize it, since what you have gets the job done, and (B) after a day of contentedly programming in the same style all day at work, one wants to be with family/friends/boyfriend/girlfriend or to pursue non-programming interests… I think this, more than anything else, is the prime value of books, blogs, and conferences like No Fluff Just Stuff - to provide the much needed red pill to rut dwellers like myself. Paradigm shifts are brain candy. Go ahead, indulge yourself.