I was reading an article last week.  Something in the MIT Technology Review…  Toolkits for the Mind.  This article reminded me of my  interest in the mappings between language and perception.

I fix things.  That’s what I seem to do.  People bring me problems and  I find solutions.  Sometimes, it’s not what others might have planned, but that’s what I do.   But I do it all in code.  As part of this, I have to acknowledge that all of my solutions are bounded by the languages I use to code those solutions.

I know a handful of programming languages.  I started with GW Basic at about 8 or 9 in my parents basement.  I picked up Pascal, C, C++ in college.  In my first real job after graduating college I learned Perl.  I lived and breathed the LAMP stack for years.  Then new SQL variants.  A few scraps of VB.  Somehow, I ended up using C# and XAML for 90% of what I code today.

So how do I break out of those boundaries?

In the last year, I’ve been trying to reframe my programming.  I want to leverage the larger concepts of the art of solving problems with code.  The effort is more than Computer Science.  It includes Philosophy, Linguistics,  Neurobiology, and Cognitive Science.  I’m trying to rewire my brain along the way by forcing myself to think outside of my comfort zone.  AOP is a part of that effort.  We’ll see how all of this turns out in the next year.