Now What?

After nearly a month, I finally waded through the 600 page PHP programming book I've been working on. But now I'm looking around and just realized that I don't have anything to read, and we were just at the library today. Crap. Ah well. I have a bunch of software to install and configure, then go back through the last three books I've read and physically do all the exercises and projects in them. I haven't typed in a mass of code in a good three years, so this ought to be fun. In a totally geek-fun sort of way. I just love messing with programming languages.

One thing that is really fun is sorting out a language's "family tree" based on all the little odd quirks that made sense when they were first implemented, but are now carried forward "just because." Reading these books, I was amused by some of the tortured explanations the authors came up with. Even better were the non-explanations; "It's that way because programming languages have always done it that way." Sorry, no they haven't. It's that way because of choices made by the developers of the language that is the parent (or grandparent, great-grandparent, etc.) of the one under discussion. Other language families follow completely different conventions.

Well. enough geek stuff. Off to bed.