Today I had some plans to rewrite my python trading bot in Rust. I don’t know Rust too well, but I have wanted to build something with it since I started going through the Stanford experimental OS class.   Instead,  I started learning Haskell. (And I installed neovim after seeing a fellow recurser use it during mob programming. And I turbo charged my .vimrc.)

The first activity of the day was pair programming, and I pair programmed with someone who, like me, did not have a lot of experience with Haskell.   So our pair programming was more like pair learning.

This was interesting in that it drew attention to my habits of learning new programming languages. My pair had different habits and together we approached learning Haskell in a way neither of us would do on our own.   This I found refreshing.

After that I picked up a Haskell book from the library upstairs and immediately felt like I was thrown back to a theory of computation class and context free grammars and all that jazz- are Haskell  languages just really grammars??  Maybe its all the pipes?

I do feel like Haskell is a well made language and I love how the language seems to build itself from its own ‘primitives’.   That said, I think it would take me a while to develop a real mastery.  My goal with Haskell is to finish up a toy program tomorrow and then move on to my main crypto project with a code review of truffle – and forget about the rust trading bot -even though it has been on my todoist for 8 months.

However, I am going to end this with a coda. Being at RC reminds me of Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own :””In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century” (also true for NYC in the 21st century especially if you have some kids and a dog)

Right now, I feel being at RC is sort of having a room of my own, a space to sit down quietly and go down the rabbit holes with out the pressure of optimizing every moment for action or production.