// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

No, really, this was way unexpected. And I’ve had no stinkin’ antidepressants either, just old’ school anticonvulsants; this week I took my first non-anticonvulsant med and it was an antipsychotic. I’ve been depressed all my life, mostly the dysthimic, “soft” kind of depressed comparable to the chinese torture where they tie you down and let a tiny droplet of water fall on your head every ten seconds.

But with some random lashes of the real stuff too. And then, when the last straw broke, maybe a year ago, a psychiatrist (whom I shall refer as my shrink) diagnosed a case of “soft” bipolar II and gave me anticonvulsants with a soft, very soft antidepressant edge. Then I fliped out. Not like now, anyway. They never expected the spanish inquisition that even though I’d get better from the depression and have longer and longer periods of stability and an improving overall functioning (a better social life, an actual job), I’d be getting these progressively higher crises of [hypomania.

Thinking back, I've had a couple of [hypo]manias before treatment. Guess I am bipolar after all. I shall refer to them all as manias; apparently you only get to call them manias if you spontaneously self-combust from the sheer self-destructive behaviour, and as long as you have a shred of consciousness you don’t get to be manic.

I have a shred of consciousness. I’m here at work, where everyone’s wearing a suit and I’m supposed to be preparing for an important meeting in two hours, and I’m in my “KILL YOUR POP STARS” t-shirt setting up the blog journal for the book I’ve been writing for a few weeks now. But I noticed that. I’ve not gone psychotic, I’m just having fun.  Because contrary to what jaggerian though proposes, I can always get what I want.

Wow! I didn’t expect the spanish inquisition getting on the front-page of programming.reddit.com (I didn’t even submit my post to the site) and sparkling such a lively discussion there. I would just reply there, but I somehow feel it’s better to leave a more “permanent” record — even if for my own future reference — of my thoughts on the issues raised.

Vintermann’s interpretation of my point was this:

The issue for me is that from the syntax, you could believe

greet = do {
putStr (”You’re “++ getLine ++”years old! \n”);
putStr (”Congratulations! \n”);
}

was valid haskell, which it isn’t

This is specially true since <- as destructive update/assignment is used in many pseudocode languages in introductory books — particularly Knuth’s TAOCP, as well as some languages (like The Other Language I Use, GNU R).

Ricercar adds

(…) [M]onads are not limited to one interpretation, whereas “do notation” is strongly tied to the imperative interpretation.
This is much like “Lawyer Language” that is confusing precisely because it looks somewhat like natural language, when it really isn’t.

Well, yes, I couldn’t agree more. Maybe I’m unconsciously selecting the favorable comments — the one that further illustrate my point. But let’s examine pjdelport’s reply:

That’s hardly fair; programming language constructs don’t carry the same expectation of consistency that natural languages do. Both their syntax and semantics are wildly variable and arbitrarily incompatible, for even the most common things.

There’s two problems with this remark. In first place, ambiguity in natural language is in fact expected and discounted — often large chunks of natural language are confirmation requests and clarifications — while programming languages are mostly expected to be “logical” and consistent. In second place, that head in Beta means an iterator while in Haskell it means a cons-list “destructor” just means languages are different — much like in english “cola” evokes “soda” and in portuguese it means “glue”.