While Leon has been learning about arts, and he as been writing about it, I caught up with a hobby of my own as well, but I have been silent about it. I befriended Alan Turing. And it’s time I talk about it.
Let me keep it short so I can get to the point. Some time ago, while Leon was writing to me that he wanted to get into arts, and I was writing about arts for him, I was having jobs I was not enjoying. At one of them, I had to do too many repetitive tasks, and I discovered that somebody before me had left so called scripts to help automate some of it. I saw it as a salvation, quickly googled everything about it, got into StackOverflow, Coursera, Edx, and whatnot, and decided I could finally have some fun at work exploring how not to work and still get paid. Things escalated, I took it too serious (not without some help from they guys at Buffalo or Jorge), I realised how little I knew, how fascinating everything I didn’t knew was, how related to my best times back in Mathematics in college it all is, and how much was out there to learn, discover, develop, and in general, do. So I made it official at some point among my closest circles: I wanted to become a programmer. Not just a programmer: I wanted to become The One, The Informatics Man.
So, what have I learnt? I’m a man of history, that likes to think about the chronological series of events, influences and responses, that built the current status quo. The same way some artists believe that to do art you don’t need to know about old artists, while other artists firmly believe that history empowers you, I’m a man of the second category. There’s also my background having a big role in my path today: I studied mathematics. Even if I abandoned university (very proudly so), not loving maths was not the reason: I love maths. I have all the habits I already had and strengthened during college, those of abstractions and patterns, that consistent habit of looking under the hood. I discovered that, essentially, this new science is built onto two pillars: the language you’re using, and the hardware that runs it. It’s what everybody talks about. So more than how to make pretty websites or pretty games, I was curious about how can people make them. They all need a language, and some hardware, to begin with. And in the linguistic world, mathematics are shinning. Just what I wanted.
I always thought that people shouldn’t speak about what they don’t know (take note world), and that, combined with how much brilliant people there is out there talking about computers, made me very reluctant to try to talk about my dim ideas. Besides, I was too busy reading about it to find any time to write about it. But I’m building a thought of my own, and it’s time I talk a bit about it.
Wait for my thoughts, they’re coming out of the oven as I write. There will be formal logics, computational theory, analysis of academia publications, lambda calculus, type theory, and whatnot. It’s all coming.
[…] Last time, I mentioned to have befriended Alan Turing. Who? You might fairly ask. Why? Those who already know him might add. Let me answer those questions. […]