Amanda, Getting Old, and Haskell

 Amanda, Getting Old, and Haskell

By Bobby Neal Winters

Country singers can explain who we are much quicker than writers like me can.  So let’s get some help.

Bob McDill wrote the song Amanda that Don Williams and Waylon Jennings both covered.  Each has a slightly different interpretation of it.  The lines in question from Williams point of view:

I've held it all inward, Lord knows I've tried

It's an awful awakenin' in a country boy's life

To look in the mirror in total surprise

At the hair on your shoulders and the age in your eyes

Jennings did this part differently. It was “The hair on my shoulders, the age in my eyes.”

To recognize that someone dear to you is getting older and that you yourself are getting older are two different things.  Which of those two awakenings is more awful depends upon who in particular is being awakened.

For me, it wasn’t looking in the mirror where I had my eyes opened, but looking though the document camera. Not at my hair--the Winters go prematurely gray; not my eyes--I don’t particularly look at my eyes. It was my hands.  If I looked at them directly, they looked normal, but if I was adjusting some document on the document camera that I was showing to a class, I saw my hands on their own.  I looked and asked, who do those old man’s hands belong to?

They were mine.

In the song, we might well laugh because this insight of aging is being had by a 30-year-old.  I myself am surrounded by people who tell me, hey at 61 you’re still a kid.

They are beginning to die off, however. 

The folks who are in good shape seem to follow the Triad: Physically Active, Mentally Active, Socially Engaged.  Keep your mind busy; keep your body moving; be around people, however much they annoy you.

So I’m doing my woodworking.  I’m attempting to increase my social reach in certain ways.

And I am trying to learn the Haskell computer language.  Those of you who dutifully follow this space may remember that a few years ago I took up the Python computer language.  If you do, that marks you as being kind of a nerd.  

That’s okay.  We are organized now. You can come to the meetings.

But I’ve learned the Python language.  I can do pretty much what I want to do in it.  True, the “what I want to do” is a pretty big constraint, but still I feel happy with it.

Haskell--I am finding--it a totally different kettle of fish.  While Python possessed many new features that made a lot of things that used to be quite laborious easy, Haskell is the opposite.  It not only lacks those extra features, but they’ve taken away a few more.

I will avoid going into more detail.  If you aren’t into it, I’ve probably told you more than you want to know. If you are, then either you already know or you can ask me: I would love to off load.

What I’ve learned in my 61 years of life is that (1) I am a pretty smart cookie; but (2) there are a lot of people who are a hell of a lot smarter than me; and additionally (3) I am a bulldog in that when I get my teeth into something I don’t turn it loose.  

Together, this is a gift.  What I can do is learn what the smarter people have done through pure stubbornness, translating it from their brilliance into language more humans can understand.

My mental teeth are now sunk into Haskell. 

I’ve recently read that the way the casinos get you hooked on slot machines is to let you win a little every once in a while.  The random shots of dopamine into your brain are addiction itself.

I’ve found the same with Haskell.  I beat my head against the wall for an hour or two being completely mystified, and then something works, and I get a rush.  I find out that I just understood something or I just made something happen by accident. 

One reason I am finding it to be attractive is its connection with mathematics.  It is a very mathematical computer language. Very.  I would say more, but I need to gnaw on it some more so that I can explain it better.

We’re coming to a close, so I need to refer back to the beginning.  I would be nice to say my hair might be gray, my eyes might be old, my hands are a 61-year-old train-wreck, but my mind is still young.

That’s not the case.

My mind is old too. If I don’t watch myself, working on this will give me a migraine. But 21-year-old self wouldn’t’ve known that.  My 21-year-old self wouldn’t’ve had the self-discipline to stick with Haskell and learn as much as this 61-year-old self has.

Change in the verse below, change “hillbilly band” to “learning a computer language", correct the ages, and make it rhyme, and you’ve got what I’m trying to say:

Well a measure of people don't understand

The pleasures of life in a Hillbilly band

I got my first guitar when I was 14

Now I'm crowdin' 30 and still wearing jeans

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.