Brain damage and Lisp-derived languages
I've been perusing a few different blogs about various programming topics, starting from this post which Chris posted on the GNE forums.
In looking through the various linked blogs, I came across brain death by dull cubicle, a very interesting article considering mental health and the workplace. This led me to a couple of other interesting articles about various ergonomics topics... if you have a chance to go through and read them, do!
In other news, the same initial post and a couple of the ones it links to inspired me to not only get back into learning Smalltalk (using Squeak) but also to pick up both Ruby and Lisp. I've had a mild interest in Smalltalk for a while because from what I've heard, it makes a lot of OO techniques much easier and more elegant to use than other languages. Ruby and Lisp are new interests; I've studied Lisp and Scheme before, but never enjoyed it that much... I think a large part of that is simply because I never found a good use for it. Maybe if I have a reason to use it, I'll come to enjoy it more.
All this talk of Smalltalk got me wondering if there were a Smalltalk-implemented window manager around, and the only actual link to a WM I found was a link to Ion, which I've never used extensively, but I've decided I should, since it basically started the tiled window manager approach. I've long been a fan of tiled window managers, and have used them for quite some time. (starting with wmii, then poking at a few others such as larswm and xmonad, and finally writing my own using PLWM) The other interesting things is that Ion's site is set up like a blog; there are links to a number of articles on usability and keyboard usage in GUI design. In fact, I just signed myself up to give a talk next week on usability, using a bunch of information from these blogs. This should be fun...