How to deal with an aging brain.


Entry: Naming it
Date: Mon Feb 19 17:44:26 CET 2018

Time to accept it: it isn't as it used to be, and it's not getting
better.  For a couple of years now I've seen a steady decline in
fatigue and working memory.

I want to keep programming, so I need to re-tune my tools.

Some ideas:

- types: a large part of the problem is not catching small
  inconsistencies early enough.  A good type system catches 99% of
  that.

- automate everything.  a working tool is the best documentation.

- raise the abstraction level



Practically, this means mostly Haskell and Rust.

- Haskell:
  - build system
  - DSL for algorithm (modeling + code gen)
  - property based testing

- Rust: operational code




Entry: Shake
Date: Wed Feb 21 22:37:32 CET 2018

Nice for incremental work.  I think this is a keeper.  Which moves the
pointer to Rust to try next.



Entry: Erlang
Date: Thu Feb 22 11:44:55 CET 2018

So the thing is not that Erlang is bad.  It is that I do not know how
to use dialyzer properly.  Type information is lost.

One way around this is to add "check" functions that do nothing, but
have a type signature.

EDIT: It is hard to make the dialyzer precise enough.  The best bet is
still to add a lot of annotations.



Entry: TLA+
Date: Wed Feb 28 10:58:46 CET 2018

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLA%2B
https://twitter.com/Hillelogram