In your first post, you're expected to uncover the motivation behind this whole project and justify its very existence. I'll give it a try — but I won't try too hard, that's for sure.
It's January 2025, and I feel like this year's Advent of Code was the last straw. I realized that as I'm learning new things, I need to write them down. Doing AoC in Racket and hanging out in the Racket Discord server made me realize that maybe I want to commit a tiny bit more: use Racket more for my day-to-day tasks and hobby projects, read to cover my knowledge gaps, and dig deeper into other cool Lisps, such as Guile Hoot for HTML5 games and Janet as a nice embeddable language.
I've been a C++ guy since university. C++ is still there and isn't going anywhere; it pays my bills duly. But, as you might have guessed, I need a breath of fresh air. Rust is usually the next logical step for someone like me, as it solves a lot of C++ issues and has created this whole cult culture around the language. I tried it. I can't really complain — it just doesn't feel fun. And if it doesn't, I don't want to do it for free.
Upd: Right after I wrote this down I bumped into an interview with Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and a mind behind Ghostty, where he uses almost the same exact words justifying Zig choice over Rust.
When I write and read Rust I'm not having fun and I want to have fun
... A part of the joy is writing the code
Programming is (should be) fun! Sussman
Lisp just does it for me, and I'm not even good at it. Every time I read the first chapters of SICP, those words hit the target every time. Words about legendary "Lisp wizards", "spirits of the computer" obeying our powerful "spells". And, of course, this famous quote by Alan J. Perlis:
I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while, we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free, perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing, other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
This blog doesn't compete, nor does it try to compete, with amazing Beautiful Racket explainers, but the idea is somewhat similar. I want to write down what I learn, no matter how trivial, while I still manage to remember it. Showing somebody else your code let alone prose makes you feel vulnerable, that additional fear of looking incompetent makes me research the topic a tiny bit deeper before writing a blog post on it. Meaning, not only do I enjoy the process of creating for its own sake, but I also learn and can use this site as a cheatsheet later.
That said, I'm fully prepared to be the sole reader of this blog, and that's absolutely fine with me.