I'm learning a new programming language. Yeah, Java.
I'm enjoying the experience, but I have to admit that I'm just tinkering. My deadlines for learning the language are all self-imposed, and nobody's going to test me at the end of this self-assigned course of study. I'm certainly not complaining, but there is a downside to low-pressure learning: I miss the immersion experience of being thrown into the programming pool to sink or swim. Of course, the immersion experience also has its downside: the bottom of the pool, ha ha.
Whoa. Time out. Gotta change metaphors. I can just tell that this swimming metaphor is going to sweep us along until we're growing gills and leaping upstream to spawn. This'll just take a second.
Okay, we're remetaphorized. The new metaphor is drug addiction, always a popular one, especially with the younger programmers. In the language of this new metaphor, the danger in throwing yourself totally into a programming project is that you may get hooked and not know it. It's not until you blink your bleary eyes over the bank statement and realize that for the past ten minutes you've been trying to balance your checkbook in Java that you know you've got a problem. But that's good: Admitting that you're hooked is half the solution. The other half is commitment. Decide, once and for all, that you like being hooked, doggone it, and you're going to stay hooked. Get a life? Pshaw.
This is your life. Live to code, code to live. Embrace the monkey on your back, I say. Once again, you want to take these metaphors with a grain of salt, or you could end up with cervical damage. Here's a poem I once wrote on this theme. I think it has new relevance today. I call it "Java."
Java
I need that first cup of my morning caffeine;
It helps me get up for my daily routine.
I'm not really fit to see or be seen
Till I've had a hit off the coffee machine.
(I churned out, one morning by seven fifteen,
On eight cups of coffee, the verses you're seeing.)
And throughout the day, why I drink it then too,
For all of the crises it helps float me through.
And when I've more work than one person can do,
I'll drink it fresh-brewed or as thick as old glue.
You think me debased? A caffeine libertine?
Well I think that HoJo's is haute joe cuisine.
I've tried to swear off, but I keep coming back;
Just when I feel cured, then I have an attack.
I know that you think that it's courage I lack,
But I think it's coffee, please, I take it black.
It makes me alert; it makes me serene;
So make me a cup from the coffee machine.
While coffee's the niftiest sin that I've seen,
As vices go, verses are almost as keen.
But this one must end 'causeyou know what I mean:
It's time for my coffee klatsch to convene;
So grind up the berries, fill up the tureen,
And brew up a slew of the juice of the bean.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@cruzio.com