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ralphcHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

For the most part I'm staying near my field of study, programming, programming languages, theory …

For the most part I'm staying near my field of study, programming, programming languages, theory about programming etc. In that way, just about everything I see I can relate to something I've learned before, I'm in true "I've seen it all before" mode at my age. For example the pattern matching and recursion-based "looping" navigation is just like when I went through my Haskell/Ocaml/Common Lisp/Scheme phase in the mid 2000's, so it was easy to pick up. The only new part of it is the actor-based concurrency model. My foray into Category Theory so far has been reading "The Joy of Abstraction", which is a layman's book to CT. So far what's she's written makes perfect sense and would be mostly obvious to anyone who hangs out on HN. Moving up and down various levels of abstraction, the idea of "functions", as I read this I'm basically thinking it's what I've been doing for the past 40 years, not a big deal. We'll see as I continue in it. Circling back to the original question, it's hard to assess my learning ability since I'm not venturing out into totally new territory for me. …

Original discussionAsk HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?299 source comments · at import
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markus_zhangHN

Thanks for sharing. I really look up to people like you as I'd like to semi-retire around 55 too (13 years from now on). I have a question for you: How do you assess your learning ability at 55? Let me explain -- I'd like to pursue studies in some Physics topics when I semi-retire (I can't do that now due to lack of time), but I'm not sure whether my brain is up to the job then. I know you are not studying Physics, but category theory is definitely non-trivial. How do you assess your ability to grapple with difficult theories? A side question: do you exercise routinely, and if so do you think it contributes significantly to your health? Thanks for any insight.

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markus_zhangHN

Thanks a lot. I do agree that staying in familiar ground requires less brain work. I do agree with the "more time without a job" observation. That's part of the motivation to pick up serious stuffs when I go semi-retire. I hope you get well (the heart attack thing), but I'm happy that you make those changes when still young (relatively).

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knighthackHN

Out of curiosity, what was the trigger for the heart attack? I see you enjoyed your work, so I wonder if the stresses were beyond that? Or was it a diet/lifestyle issue?

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