[m-users.] Factored out disjunction no longer compiles, generates determinism error.

[Sean Charles (emacstheviking)]

I know Volker.
I have not felt this bad since I started learning Haskell over a decade ago!

My problem is I always want to run before I learn to walk. I am 56 this year and it feels like time is running out. The project I am torturing myself with I started nine years ago but life gets in the way. I lost both parents to cancer at the time, my mother in law died from cancer three years ago and I had bowel cancer myself just 18 months ago and it really really feels like the clock is ticking and I want to die at least knowing I finished --something- in the hardest language I could find. It all comes down to feeling stupid all the time because I didn’t go to university. I could have gone, I had three A-levels in maths, physics and computer studies and a place at Loughborugh for a 3 year Computing and Informatics course but I —couldn’t— go for personal reasons and I live to regret every single day of my life. I have been declined job interviews because of it, I've worked with people with degrees who seem utterly useless and unteachable. Amazon, Google etc have all dropped that requirement, even Elon Musk doesn’t seem to place too much on the piece of paper.
But. Self worth.

With the Mercury mercurial progress I have made so far, the code absolutely water tight. There is something about Mercury more-so then Haskell that gives me great glowing fuzzy feelings about the logical quality of the code, the fact it made me think so damned hard about its determinism for example.I can remember many head scratching moments learning Prolog over the year where a predicate fails and you don’t know why. So then it’s down to debugging. Fortunately SWI has a great debugger!

Thanks to you, Zoltan, Julien etc I have a lot of code I can read but the problem for me seems to be one of conceptual understanding. Not haveing been formally schooled I have had to teach myself and there are quite obviously glaring great gaps the size of black holes here and there in my knowledge!

Still, as I always say, the —core— skill for a developer is perseverance and I have that in stacks(!) for some reason.

Thank you everybody for listening to and putting up with my sometimes mercurial Marvin-esque mutterings. If only my brain was the size of a planet…

Anyway, back to the car-park…

Sean.
:)



> On 9 May 2021, at 01:07, Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de> wrote:
> 
> Am Samstag, den 08.05.2021, 22:30 +0100 schrieb Sean Charles
> (emacstheviking):
>> 
>> I am going to bed thoroughly disillusioned. I fi didn’t need the money I’d
>> quit software yesterday.
>> :|
> 
> Relax. I felt disillusioned, at the beginning, too. When you grasp what's
> going on, it all makes sense and you can write wonderfully logical programs.
> 
> Volker