I remember reading the “choose your own adventure” Books as a child and they were great fun. I didn’t discover computers until college and missed out on the text adventure genre. The lisp exercises that Dr. Barski is taking me through are great fun. I really like the graphviz tool he created to vizualize the game nodes. I will be able to use that in some other areas that interest me. I am finding that a scientific approach works well with his style of teaching. When I was in school for biology I did my best lab work when properly prepared. This entailed reading through the experiment/lab first and making sure I was familiar with all of the terms. Then, the experiment/lab was more fun to complete because I knew what to expect and the unanticipated things that came up were not roadblocks. I have been approaching the Land of Lisp book in a similar way: read the chapter first, try to understand the code he has written and look up new terms that I am not familiar with and then writing the code to get it running on my computer. I am looking forward to getting GTW (Grand Theft Wumpus) working. Oh yes, one more thing. Reading through the code for GTW last night it occured to me that Lisp is weird. Weird in the way that some of the trips I took in college were weird, but fun and memorable. It’s like my brain twists as I try to understand what is going on and in twisting to facilitate understanding, the memory changes the physical part of my brain somehow. Sort of like the idea in the documentary “Between The Folds” where the smart origami guy describes how you can give a piece of paper “memory” by folding it. I’m not sure if this will make sense to anyone besides myself, unless you were someone I knew at Kent State between 95’ and ‘99.
12/9/2010 ~ 2 min read
