Welcome to another update.
I should warn you this is more of the same.
I think I have got what I want from reading the Haskell book. It has demystified many of the concepts around Haskell. I may return to the book at some point but am very happy to stop reading it at about two thirds of the way through. That's 800 pages in and given I completed nearly every question posed the total time invested is around 100hrs work. Time well invested. Link to the book. I haven't kept up with the available Haskell books but this is the best one I have read. Well nearly read.
I mentioned to someone that I had been reading the book and they said they thought Haskell had died out a decade or two ago. I don't disagree with that statement as Haskell has never been a success in popularity. I did point out that most of the feature they love in their favourite programming language was available in Haskell a few decades ago :)
It seems that I am in an umproductive cycle of spending too much time learning about programming languages, but never in great detail. It is time to break out of that in a similar to what my approach to my health. It is kind of a natural next step as many of the changes about my health were guided by wanting to increase my ability to concentrate. Small changes that let me get a process in place to take me in the direction I want to go. It is about facing the reality of my personality and avoiding goals preferring to go with process.
One observation is I am drawn to strange/obscure programming languages. This is cool but I am stuck in a local maximum of development. From a learning point of view I don't make progress on various topics as I decide to use some obscure programming language and spend my time learning that.
To try to get a handle on this I am going to try to only use Python or Zig. Python is for the batteries it has. The library support is awesome allowing you (me?) to explore any topic of computing with relative ease. Obviously Python is not perfect for SCIP or Software Design for Flexibility, if I decide to work though those I may allow scheme :) These books are probably a couple of hundred hours of study, so it is not something I plan to tackle this year. Unless I get to take a month of work.
Why Zig? Well I kind of like the look at it. The low level stuff I do is fairly small so doesn't need the big guns of large library support that Rust has.
My middle son has been wanting me to learn a bit about Roblox development with him. Well he is way ahead of me having released a few games. So I may become the OG (Old guy) doing Roblox for a while. I guess Lua is on the allowed list:) I may write a longer post about Roblox Studio so won't talk too much about it now.
It is going to take a while to turn this ship, partly because I am not too sure the exact direction I want to head. I know I want to break the treadmill of learning new langauges. I probably need to go up into the mountains and come down with a direction of change. Yep I literally did that when thinking about my health.
That leads me nicely onto the health section.
March has not been great. Various family events meant my diet was not great. It is back on course again. Kind of the point of having system/rules rather than goals is I get to say yep I slipped, lets get back to it rather than beating my self up for missing a goal.
I have been experimenting with eating just once a day. A big meal in an attempt to get enough nutrients. Currently I seem to do this twice a week, although this week I broke the record and hit 5 days in a row. I do allow myself a coffee at lunchtime and then try to sit quietly reading some fiction. It is actually quite nice. I am not sure I would want to do it every day but I am happy to see where this goes.
I have been reducing my meat intake without really thinking about it. I just haven't felt like eating much of it. Just enjoying vegetables more than usual and feel a little lighter for not eating so much of it. Again not sure if this trend will continue but I think it will. I do seem to be focusing a little better so again I am happy to see where this goes.
I treated myself to a new monitor, finally moving up to a 4K one. Small things to make one happy in life :). It is a mid range one but wow does the text look nice on it. Emacs looks so nice it makes me want to write text. Now you know why this post is so long.
4K and Linux (Ubuntu) was not without issues though. Nothing too bad but could do with some work.
That's about it really. I still have a few things on the list to alter but the number of new ideas is diminishing. This is good, hopefully I can settle into a pattern and stop thinking about my health.