One of the most fun aspects of technology is the ability to just up and create something. I actually find this easiest with stringcrafts. Feeling awkward at a party? Crochet finger puppets. Microphone for the read-aloud hard to keep at a standard distance from people’s mouths? Ply and braid a cord for it. Stuff needs transporting from hither to yon? Angle bungee cords properly to keep it from sliding off the bike rack.
I haven’t found ways to make programming usage as casual as string usage. Because of this, I sometimes forget that programming can be a casual solution to ideas or problems.
I read Simon Peyton Jones’ STM essay in Beautiful Code last night, and worked through the code to make sure I understood. I’d used STM in Haskell before, but for thorny networking problems that made it hard to understand how simple the magic actually is. At some point this morning I decided to combine STM and gtk2hs (which I’ve never used beyond a single ten-line example, and which I had installed incorrectly on my box as part of an installation of leksah) to produce a graphical representation of the Dining Philosophers problem. I now (after time off for reading, lunch, goofing off, and spending time with friends and their kittens) have a working and attractive implementation.
Creation is fun.