R, S, T, and other programming languages not generally spoken of in polite circles

I suppose I know a thing or two about the care and feeding of a blog. After 124 posts, I know a little, anyways- this blog has been read on six continents (over 40 countries!). One of the little things I think I know is that a blog post should try to have a clever title, a "hook". The content, of course, should also be interesting, or at least relevant. I've written a few pieces which I consider absolutely golden, and then there have been a few that were just plain... meh.

Today's title, though, explodes the bounds of known civility: of the folks who visit my blog, I believe only my good e-buddy Dr. Lee Baker will have the foggiest notions of what R, S and T are about (by the way- if you DO know anything about these languages, drop a comment and I'll be happy to give you and/or your website or firm bit of free web publicity).

As for me, well... I've actually got a copy of R of one of the PCs in the Secret Underground Lair. I've done about as much with it as I have with MySQL, which is to say, not much. R is a derivative, successor, or just plain newer version of S... seriously, I'm not making this up. T, however, is the oddball in this group. As I as thinking of a topic involving programming languages, I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be an absolute hoot if there was a T programming language?" Well, be careful what you wish for- T is out there, it's pretty obscure, but it really does exist. Depending on your source, it's either an implementation of the Scheme language or Lisp.

The reason all of this is here is because I'm trying to get back into programming. I mean, part of my job title is "programmer", but what we typically do falls more into layout than anything, in most cases. And, being that the software utilized is expensive, it's out of the reach of "normal" humans, it's not just something one goes out and buys and gets good at. How expensive is it? Well, one could purchase several stand-alone copies of Adobe's CS6 for the same price as one license of what we use. So, I'm looking at a few languages that have a common characteristic, namely price. Of course, that price is FREE.

For those non-geeks out there, there is a plethora of high-quality software available- robust, well-supported and developed, and used in every sort of business, educational and scientific endeavor. R is one of these languages. I'm not sure that I'll ever use it, but it's on my radar. The language at the top of my list is Python- I hope to collaborate a bit with Mr. T in the near future on a Python project. Perl is also on my list, as well as JavaScript and Visual Basic.    

And there you have it- I'm on record and on the hook now to start working on one of these languages.

On the data front, my Access form is partially rebuilt- I hope to have that up and running soon.

That's it- it's nearly 0600 local (GMT-5)

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.


June 5, 2016 update: this was originally published on Sep 16, 2014, and is one of the 1st of what I hope to be an occasional series of blog updates- microblogs, I suppose.

Where am I at? Well, in case you missed it, the database had a catastrophic hardware failure, and it was not backed up. I'm still pretty much at "Hello, world" with Python 3, and although my analytical skill are vastly improved, my practical programming experience at work is only modestly improved.

On a sad note, Meerkat suffered her FOURTH flat in just over four years today. Fortunately, we carry one of those all-in-one emergency devices: air pump, jumper, lights and USB power supply.  I know EXACTLY where and when it happened. There is absolutely no way I can avoid the tollway construction, and it is the cause of two of the flats.

Meerkat receiving CPR (Car Pneumatic Resupply)

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

Decaf programming

Well, not really!

I know that's probably a big surprise, but I think that in addition to education, experience and creativity, caffeine is widely regarded as a necessary component of programming. Well, that's not necessarily true... I think.

I got up fairly late Sunday morning, as I had worked pretty late Saturday. We'd had a good amount of rain for the past five days, but at least one weather forecast indicated that today was going to be dry, so I had planned to cut the grass and then do some yard work. Well, that didn't happen, as not long after I got up, ... it rained. I popped open a 1.5L bottle of my preferred carbonated Polish mineral water and sat down in front of the computer.  When the water was gone, tea followed. Jennifer opted for a nap, and I sat down for some quality time with w3schools. I got to playing (for the first time!) with Javascript inside of HTML5, and I had quite a lot of fun with a simple exercise. Jennifer got up, and I had her assist with something that I got stuck on, and life was just plain good. We went off to Sam's, picked up a few things, and the evening was pretty much a database and spreadsheet night. And for those who might be wondering... I do have a life. Between the data and spreadsheet, Jennifer and I had an exquisite fried chicken dinner and watched a few episodes of Eureka.

I've also started a blog timing experiment. I'm not sure about anyone else, but I've read that certain times of the day are more effective for blogging than others. In the past, I had normally posted around midnight or a bit later in my time zone (CST= -6 GMT). I think this was pretty good for European readers, but did not make my blogs immediately known to North and South American readers. So, I'm doing some experimentation, trying to ascertain what is the best time to post to blogs. I'm thinking I'll probably do a major post once to cover LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and then do Twitter posts a few times after that.

My time hack for today is 1250 CST.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.