In Praise of Idleness

When I was in university, I liked to go to the bookstore to browse the books on the non-text book shelves. Initially, I would only browse the computer science section. At that time, unlike now, the shelves were full of titles that did not try to teach you how to use "productivity software". Instead, they had many titles that were quite obscure. I loved browsing them because they gave me an idea about the extend of the computer science field. For some reason, I had not discovered the library yet.

For a different reason I don't remember any more, I started browsing the philosophy section. Initially, I aimed for only one philosopher: Bertrand Russell. He was the only Western philosophy that I read about when I was in high school, even then indirectly. As usual, I did not know which work of his was important, and which was just for the "common man". Anyhow, one of the books I eventually bought is called "In Praise of Idleness". It is about why leisure time is important for a person.

When I bought the book, I did not know I would agree with him wholeheartedly when I started my graduate school: spending most of my time reading books in parks, going fishing, etc.

Now that I think about it, I learned the most when I was playing with the department computers, installing this and reading that program, all really for no particular purpose in mind. For one summer, we went to the department computer room around 10:30 p.m., fooled around with the programs we could find online, read all the RFCs we could find, implemented all the protocols described in the RFCs we could understand, went to the same donut shop for donuts around 3 a.m., back to the computer room for another three hours, went back to my apartment for a snack, usually boiled pork tongues with chillies, and then went to bed.

I did not do a thing that summer that I could report to my supervisor about. But I had a very good supervisor, a topic I will write about soon. She allowed me to learn to think, to write, and to simply find my own way. I am so grateful I had the opportunity to be supervised by her.

Back to idleness. It is actually very hard for me to imagine what I would be like without that summer.

Idleness is so important, indeed.

Late Lessons

I was reading some of the posts in a forum on my high school. The name of a teacher kept popping up. I wasn't sure about who the teacher was, as the name was in English, and I only remember my high school teachers by their Chinese names. So, I decided to get out my yearbook and find out who that teacher could be. I found the teacher, but just like other aspects of this nostalgia business, I got distracted by the foreword of the yearbook, written by the principal at the time.

Sometimes, time has the effect of filtering out trivial things, and leaves only something important behind. Other times, it simply erases everything, important or not. I am not sure what I thought of the remarks in that foreword the first time I read it. I bet I did not pay much attention to it. When I read it again, a few minutes ago, I was struck by the simple wisdom it contains: learn an additional language, and your horizon widens. Such a simple lesson, so easily dismissed.

After struggling with English for the last 25 years, I have to say I wish I started paying attention to English much earlier. Perhaps I would not have needed a few years, wasted years, to become proficient in English.

Then, I read about the comments by some of the former students on the teacher whose name started this whole thing for me. I was again struck by how similar I probably felt when I was their age.

It is so easy to be destructive, and so difficult to be constructive.

Perl

I am not sure there is a language hated with a passion by more people than Perl. It seems to me that it is almost fashionable to hate Perl. Well, why, it is ugly. It is impossible to maintain. It has no abstraction mechanism. It has no data structures. It is not object-oriented. And so on.

Well, I like Perl. I have been using Perl for 15 years, and I am not about not to use Perl. In fact, I probably use Perl more these two years than before.

What is the reason I like Perl? Well, first, I am not a point-and-click person. I would rather write a script to automate a task I have to do repeatedly than to go through all the clickings over and over again. Second, many of these tasks are rather similar, but not similar enough that the same script can be re-used frequently. In other words, cut-and-paste is actually the best re-use strategy for these tasks. Third, input-output seems to be an afterthought for a lot of languages. Perl handles I/O much better than these languages. I can keep listing more and more reasons why I like Perl. All these reasons boil down to one thing: Perl is very useful to write a lot of small to medium tasks.

Now, don't I think Perl is ugly? Well, I used SNOBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC (without real subroutines), etc., before: Perl is not particularly ugly in its syntax. I would venture to say that an unstructured Perl program is more or less as ugly as a FORTRAN program with no indentation and heaven forbids, no whitespaces.

Of course, you can hate Perl all you like. If you actually know enough about Perl, I will respect your opinion. If not, oh well, sometimes, we all like to hate things we don't know much, don't we?

We can't go home again

These are the things I did in the last two weeks that have something to do with my high school: I joined a forum for the high school, I found the email address of one of my high school classmates, and I scanned through some of the letters I received in high school and the first ten years after that. It has been very interesting, to say the least.

Of course, I was not one of the star students in high school that everybody remembers. I was rather mediocre and I doubt I left much of an impression on either my classmates or my teachers. So, the memory of my high school years is only precious to me, probably to nobody else.

I read some of the letters. Many hours later, I am still haunted by what my friends and classmates wrote. For some reason, high school was something they would like to forget. For me, on the other hand, the high school years were some of the best years of my life so far.

Memory tends to become bittersweet as time passes by. My tough and hard undergraduate years are simply four of the formative years for me now. At that time, life was such a struggle that I am amazed I went through it in one piece. During all those years, studying in a strange land in a strange language, the memory of my high school years gave me strength to go through the days.

Of course, we can't go home again. But that longing becomes part of the landscape, propelling me to improve my life and my way of living.

Life

I went to a park this afternoon with the family for our little kid's first picnic beside the lake. Other than the unpleasant smell, stench really, of the algae growth at the edge of the water, it was very enjoyable. The weather was wonderful, the breeze was not too strong and not too weak, the whole outing was one of those little pleasures that life provides from time to time.

Right before we left the park to go for some food and drinks, I leaned on the park bench, looking at the maple trees towering above me. The black maple tree across from the park bench looked especially majestic, with the Sun on some of its leaves, swaying slightly from side to side, it was simply beautiful.

For some reason I don't really understand, I started thinking about what I read in one of the books on the history of life, the whole notion that very far in the past, some single-cell organisms, for whatever reason, decided to join forces to become a multi-cellular organism. Of course, before that event, single-cell creatures already had parasites, and other foreign materials living symbiotically within the cell. But the almagamation of organisms to become a unified organism is just plain incredible.

When I was looking at the tree, I was really puzzled by how that event could have taken place with all these obviously unconscious organisms. Still, knowing enough about evolution and its mechanism, I know that if the circumstances were right, sooner or later, an evolutionary path would be taken.

The scale of time for something that improbable happening is obviously vast. The thinking of scale of time brought me back to a Stephen Jay Gould's essay I read this morning. The essay struck a chord in me, as it was about the scale of time for evolution, the fact that we must be very careful to make decision that seems to be good for our lifetime, but that might be bad for us, taken as a species, in the long term.