Vacuous Thoughts

A minute ago, I juxtaposed 2 phrases on a Slack chat:

I listened to Rich Hickey’s video on Hammock Driven Development a couple of days ago. It’s about modification of mind mode without resorting to chemicals. There’s a long tradition in hacker-lore that points to Zen and the martial arts too. I find showers, lawn-mowing and writing what i think I know so far (a variation of the cardboard coder trick) all help. The poets seem to prefer long walks. ‘Empty Mind’. “Nature abhors a vacuum”.

As a result of my subsequent wanderings, I learned a new word, “plenist” and “plenism” http://englishdictionary.education/en/plenism (the usual suspects)

and I saw the word “idiom”. I’ve heard “idiomatic” a lot recently, in relation to styles associated with programming languages but I wasn’t sure precisely what it meant:

I think the intended meaning is Google’s 2nd choice:

a characteristic mode of expression in music or art.

but the alternative is interesting too:

a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g. over the moon, see the light ).

How often does a ceremony gets associated with an idea, long after anyone remembers why? I ask this after reading a thought provoking comparison of the functional and object paradigms that only partly agrees with the ideas I mapped out in stickies on a paper table-cloth yesterday.

I’m “still not working”, as people say. My Dad kept a dictionary beside his chair. I continue his work with ‘tear-off here’ computer science. At least my inherited etymology is idiomatic of the Clojure community.

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