I got the chance to browse one of those mega-sized book stores the other day. I walk in with a chip on my shoulder, daring the place to have a game or a book or a magazine that catches my interest. I just find myself drifting further and further out of the mainstream as “normal” and “regular” things pale in the face of my own private obsessions. The computer book section had shrunk since my last visit. It’s like its slowly dawning on the owners that they don’t make enough money selling them to cover the costs of having to put obsoleted editions into the dumpster every couple of years. I used to could spend hours browsing the shelves, but things look strangely mundane now. Then my eyes rest on a fat shiny Apress book on Ruby.

I want that book. I want everyone to go away and I want a weekend where I can just sit and read it cover to cover. But I don’t have a single project that I need Ruby for. I don’t even really want to make a project in Ruby. I want to know what Matz did and why. I want to get the gist of it so I can understand blog posts by people that write in Ruby for no other reason than that I like those guys and feel like they care about the same things that I care about.

It’s crazy, of course. Lisp deserves at least another six months of attention and experimentation. Just the other day I was thinking that it deserved three years: one for Common Lisp, one for Scheme, and one for elisp. I was even dreading the thought of picking another language for the whole “learn one language a year” thing. Never mind the fact that I’m already procrastinating my SICP problems. Why do I want that Ruby book all of a sudden?

Ah but my head is swimming with ideas. What I really want is to apply them in a creative way to make something cool. It’s time for a pet project… but what to do?

A scan of the job boards confirms my suspicions. Lots of C# jobs sprinkled here and there. Tons of them to choose from down in the big city. But only a couple of Ruby jobs for the entire state– and no Lisp jobs. Am I wasting time? Should I hedge my bets? On the one hand I should accept the fact that the inertia of my previous work experience means I should settle for a C# job. The postings for the offbeat stuff all want super-geniuses or something. I’m just an “average” developer. And besides, if I go with C#, I can have more options in terms of where I live and what kind of environment I have to work in… right? Or have I turned a corner now that I can’t go back on? Which is it?

It’s too big a question. I need a pet project so I can explore these issues and test them in code. Talk is cheap. Code is the only real test of the ideas. Or rather, working applications, to be even more specific….

But I know how these projects work for me. I start with a sense of elation: new tools open up a door to solve a problem I’ve always wanted to solve. It looks so easy. I charge in and make inspiring amounts of progress in the beginning. Then I start to come up against the limitations of my abstractions. The pressure to get some semblance of working code is so great that I push things as hard as I can anyway… but then the muck starts to creep in. Code that looked brilliant one week becomes an embarrassment the next. And then there’s the unanticipated hard problem that saps my will to continue.

It’s like that every time. My mental vocabulary increases from one project to the next– but even powerful “new” abstractions have their limitations and blind spots so I’m always having to learn more. And while a “hard” problem that stopped me in my tracks years ago is no longer that big of a deal, there’s always more ready to come along because the scope of my ambitions is always rising faster than the rate at which I master new ideas.

In other words, there’s only trivial problems… and ones I can’t do. There are trivial abstractions… and ones that I can’t even imagine a need for. So no matter how good I get, I still feel like an “average developer”. The things I’ve mastered seem trivial– only an idiot would fail to understand them. And it’s those unanticipated problems– the ones that I least suspect– that are going to force me to expand my scope of what I consider to be trivial. But I’ll assume the tools to solve those problems are irrelevant ivory tower academic garbage until I find myself in a situation where they are the only way to get out of an ugly coding nightmare.

But when I’m in the nightmare, I won’t necessarily know what tool I need to master to get out of it. I might not even know what I need to google for! If that’s the case, then the only way forward is to work on projects that are more on my level so that I can expand my imagination to the point where I’m able to even ask the right questions. (This is why the line between doing and talking in programming is so difficult to pin down.)

Anyways… I’ve got two ideas for pet projects.

One is a Common Lisp non-application application to solve problem that’s not really a problem… but really is just a piece of problem for a lot of only marginally related problems. I’ve solved enough “hard problems” for it at this point that it should be trivial to make a single-case solution (especially if I munge just a little bit from Peter Seibel’s code examples.) The challenge would be to take that single case… and then write a few macros that are capable of generating all of that code. I’d end up with a language for solving a certain class of problems… and an application that cheats by using the REPL prompt as the primary user interface for using it. (In the process of writing it, I’ll surely end up accidentally writing my own version of some existing Common Lisp feature. I do it every time I write in Lisp.) The resulting solution will look silly to any expert Lisp user and advocates of other programming languages will tell me how they can do the same thing using some other tool.

The other is a C# application that I was working on last year. I’d solved enough “hard problems” to convince myself that I could take it on, but got stalled by an unanticipated “hard problem” that wasn’t compelling enough for me to want to tackle on my own. The project was written as a single-case solution. What I want to do is vivisect it until it becomes a tool for solving the general-case solution. I want to use every single functional technique I learned this year to get the abstractions right this time and eliminate the muck that had crept into my bloated object model. I want to write my own scripting language for it so that it’s possible for people to do unanticipated things with my solution. Success would be a working application that ends up being used by anyone other than me. (Unbelievable success would be that my solution is used by someone else to solve the “hard problem” that killed the project the year before—not at the code level, but at the meta level!)

Which one should I choose? Or should I do something else? What do you think?

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