When I was growing up, I wanted to read The Lord Of The Rings, but I would pick it up, plow through a few (hundred) pages, then put it back down again. I knew it would be good for me. I believed it would be fun. But somehow my attention would wander to other things, and I would end up putting LotR down again until the next time the urge struck. It is my particular idiosyncrasy that I want to start a thing from the beginning and see it through to the end, so each time I picked it back up, I started with page 1 of Fellowship of the Ring, instead of page 222 of The Two Towers, where I left off.
In the intervening months, I would occasionally browse the various encyclopedia, compendia, even the appendices with fascination. Still, though by then I knew the story pretty well, it was not until I was in my thirties before I succesfully read LotR cover to cover.
I can think of a few other things in my life that have been similar. Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is one. Learning LISP is another.
A week or two ago, I picked up GEB:EGB again, and I've made it
farther than I have before. It's slow going, because I like to read in
bed before going to sleep. GEB veritably demands one attack it in a
fully alert state, pencil and paper ready to work the experiments,
exercises, and demonstrations. (Try it!
Argh. Thanks, Doug.)
Still, I am undaunted.
Coincidentally, several resources for learning LISP hit the link aggregators last week, so I'm kind of enthused about that too. The thing I really need to pursue LISP is a project to use it on. One thought is to start over on the Project Euler problems. I solved several of these a while back using Python, and it was a lot of fun. Chris tackled them in LISP as a refresher (and, he said, because many problems were greatly simplified by LISP's bignum type).
Speaking of
(kill (make-list N :initial-element BIRD)
(< N (length stones)))
It would be interesting to use LISP to investigate the formal systems Hofstadter discusses in GEB.
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