Day: January 13, 2018

Culture and Code

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When I was a young programmer I worked with people from many different countries: Russia, China, India, Brazil, Africa. Of the the things that I would think of, was that all the code was in english.  Even though we would write, C++ or Java, or Perl (this was the early 00s), they were really derivative of english. A conditional in programming languages, uses the English words IF.. Then.. Else, even if case of Ruby, which was created in Japan.

I would think about this, what would a programming language look like in French, would there be a tense ending for conditionals instead of  if.. then … else.   What about a Latin programming language, would there be different kind of loops to refer to different types of time spans ? A future perfect loop, a perfect loop, an imperfect loop. What does a programming language look  like if it was built with the Japanese katakana syllabary?

This morning I ran across bato, it is a programming language written in Filipino. I dont read Filipino but this is an example of an if – then else statement:

kapag 1 > 0
  iprint "Kumusta mundo!"
kung_hindi
  iprint "Mayroong sira"
wakas

Would love to see more experiments like this in the future.

Dream Journal

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I have kept a journal for years. But in the past two years, maybe two and a half years, I have written every morning.  I don’t have any sort of guide, I write whatever I feel like. If I have a dream though, then I record my dream. I don’t interpret it. I just record it.

Someone today said that a dream journal is like a record of your unconscious. There is something beautiful and poetic about that statement. I am just meditating on it.

One of my sons wakes up everyday and tells me his dream, I feel like now I should record these dreams so that he has a record of his own unconscious -from before he could even read and write.

Above is an image from Jung’s Red Book, it was his record of his experiments with visualizations and journeying. They were more than a written record, but included painting and calligraphy, as you can see above.

I think about my own journal, and what it would take to turn it into a work of art like this. I feel like it could easily get mired in scrapbooking or mundane events.  To me, the red book is great art, to which a scrapbook or even an artist notebook. What makes that distinction? I do not know but I hope my dreams are worthy of my own red book, and that I could rise to the challenge of creation.