Michael Fogus's Blog, page 5
October 17, 2018
Monster
As I listen to “Monster” by Steppenwolf I’m reminded of my mother. Earlier this year she passed away due to complications from an infection. As a kid I was surrounded by music. My mother was alone in raising me for a large portion of my early childhood and as a result we spent a lot […]
October 5, 2018
Again
As I listen to “Again” by Silver Apples I’m reminded of something I like to call “Computational Fruit Flies.” CFFs are generally small pieces of code (note: not golf) that allow a minimal representation of a larger idea. I’ve built a whole series of pamphlets around the dissection of CFFs and have spent inordinate amount […]
August 1, 2018
Olive
Listening to Cafe Apres-Midi:Olive I’m reminded that I was once a die-hard adherent to strong statically typed languages. Since that time I’ve moved into more dynamic languages, but static thinking and programming still holds a spot in my heart. Below I’ll just briefly about the aspects of static languages and type systems that made a […]
July 23, 2018
Paperhouse
As I listen to Paperhouse by Can I’m reminded of the time that OOP started to really take off. Believe it or not, the rise of OO was driven by a real need for larger abstractions to represent increasingly larger and/or more complex systems. Likewise, the rise of Agile was a response to a real […]
July 9, 2018
Lorelei
As I listen to “Lorelei” by Cocteau Twins, I’m reminded of last week’s post where I talked about context-free music and its virtue in my personal programming head-space. In writing down my thoughts on the matter I didn’t want to give the impression that there’s a strict dichotomy between sentiment-driven and context-free music. Indeed, there […]
July 2, 2018
Saturn
As I sit here and listen to the brotherhood of saturn by Black Lung & Spiderface I’m reminded of an old interview with Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry where the former describes music as: a package for sentiment… a form of communication And more directly by the latter: (music) moves us to think and feel […]
June 25, 2018
Joyce
While listening to Melting Morning by Solar Ocean and reading Breaking up with James Joyce I’m reminded of my relationship with LISP the Lisp family of languages — but far less dire. I’m fascinated by the idea of regional or “cultural” games. By that I mean “tabletop” or card games that are popular in, and […]
June 18, 2018
Crack
While listening to Advaitic Songs by Öm and reading the ACM article “Teaching two programming languages in the first CS course” it reminded me of my faux lesson plan for a college course that no one would ever hire me to teach. In this course students would indeed use and learn two programming languages: one […]
June 11, 2018
Markland
Currently listening to Northumbria’s Markland as one does while writing code and realized that it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. This has been a pretty busy year inside and outside of my work-a-day life and as a result my pointed writings have slowed to a dull crawl. I still try to write whenever […]
Bildungsroman – Markland
Currently listening to Northumbria’s Markland as one does while writing code and realized that it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. This has been a pretty busy year inside and outside of my work-a-day life and as a result my pointed writings have slowed to a dull crawl. I still try to write whenever […]
