The journey of a million words begins with a single high. Or something like that. I got interested in the concept of Hacking with the Bond Movie Golden Eye and there was the Hacker character who had the habit of clicking a pen when he was nervous. My hero. So when I got into college, we had a lecture on Hacking by some ethical hacker guy that was pretty cool, so we tried to find out from seniors how to learn how to hack (lol). They directed us to the then Secretary of Science Club(?, my memory is a bit fuzzy) who told us to learn Python. So I didn't learn Python. I don't know why, it sounded scary or something. I had till then learnt only Java and C. In my third year, I worked through K&R problem by problem until I got to the chapter on pointers that didn't make sense to me at all then and I don't think I ever grokked pointers. Thank God for garbage collection. Anyways, when I was in Masters, I had to write a lot of simulation code and one of my seniors (Vivek Kushwaha) told me about Python with Numpy. Its a lot like Matlab, which was what I was using then. Even though I had written my whole code in Matlab for my thesis, when I was working there as a research assistant, I rewrote all the code in Python with Numpy and Scipy. Since then I got really interested in Python. Then I joined grad school and wrote quite a bit of Python (a few thousand lines I think) using Matplotlib and Pandas too. This was the time that Data Science started getting popular for the first time and platforms like Coursera and edX appeared. I think I am okay at Python, but I am in my element when I am reading posts on Hacker News not when I am actually programming. So anyways, thats it about Python.
Of course the FP acolytes do a lot of proselytizing for FP on HN, so I read a comment somewhere that "Scala is the gateway drug to Haskell" and the infamous "Monads are monoids in the category of endofunctors, whats there to understand" (I am writing out of my memory so I might be wrong). But FP felt too powerful, too arcane and I never really gave it much of a try.
Until 2024. Now I am working a Bank job as a branch manager and I really really hate my life right now. Of course, when I was doing a PhD, I hated my life then too. And when I was in college I hated my life there too. When I made the decision to sit for the recruitment exam of public sector banks, my father cautioned me against it (he worked in a PSU Bank for more than 40 years). But I told him, it couldn't be worse than my PhD, right, right? Of course, there certainly are things that I have learnt that I wouldn't have learnt anywhere else and definitely not in academia. One is punctuality. And some sembalance of a routine. I rarely take leaves, for one. I have become a lot better at conversations and am no longer as tongue tied as I was earlier. I have gained a lot of soft skills that I didn't have before and it really made me independent in a way I was never before.
In 2024, as a Branch Manager, in my chamber, in privacy, I visited the website "Category Theory for Programmers" by Barotz Milewsky (they have now blocked the site on our WAN, fucjers). I actually had this habit of trying random sites just so see if a specific one is open to access because they are banning by domain names so I guess some sites would remain open. I was Jacks surprised spleen when I discovered that Hacker News was accessible (not anymore), the Internet Archive was accessible (not anymore) and so on. Its like they have one cyber-sec guy blaclisting all the sites that I visit, because OCW used to be accessible a few years ago and I would visit it when I was free to read some lectures, but it isn't anymore. Anways, I got to like the fourth or fifth chapter of CTFP before they wised up to my act. Now the ghci and zig compiler are also blocked by Symantec. I was unable to download git bash, but I managed to install VSCode (along with a hell lot of plugins on my computer). I cannot send exes on mail, but hey I can send pdfs so I keep sending papers to my work computer and opensource books that I intend to read during the day. Did I say I hate my job? Like hating your job is a badge of honor now. You hate it and you keep at it. I also read Learn You a Haskell for Great Good and a couple other books but of course not the whole way through.