Drift: politically, I've found myself drifting to the right as I've got older. Which leaves me pretty much in the centre these days, since I started from far left about fifteen years ago. It's not uncommon for one's views to drift rightwards with age. In fact the opposite is noteworthy. Tastes, inclinations and instincts evolve as one ages. Initially I was as surprised as anyone by the emergence of more conservative impulses in my own thinking. Now I'm amused by it. Yet another reminder of how we don't control what thoughts get instanced in our wetware.

So I'm wondering if something similar to the rightwards drift also applies to taste in programming languages. More than twenty years ago I started with Basic, but quickly switched to assembler. During the 80s I did a fair bit of Z80. 8080, 6502, 8086 and 68000. There have been various detours since, but most my coding time since the late 80s has been spent with Fortran, C, C++, Java and Python. I find I like high level languages more and more. And I find I have less and less patience for tweaking detail. There are things I want to achieve, and I'm going to use the most powerful and expressive tool available to realise my goals. So this is an upwards drift, not a rightwards drift.

All this was prompted by gilbertt's post about Rich Hickey's dotNet Lisp. Hickey did some great C++ template stuff in the mid 90s. His template functor callbacks were one of the precursors of the C++ generic programming movement that's featured Stepanov, Alexandrescu and Austern recently. I wonder if Hickey has wearied of wrestling with buggy C++ compilers and hairy template code, and is moving on up to higher level programming systems.

In other news: glad to see that David McCusker is making progress in his job search. So there's some hush hush whizz bang Objective-C project in Pittsburgh, huh ? I'd go for the safe option myself, times being what they are.