On forgiveness

This video doesn't have the cats in it, but this isn't really a cat-appropriate song anyway; it's me covering a cover, Billy Bragg's version of Greg Trooper and Sid Griffin's song "Everywhere". I still haven't listened to the original, but here's an article about it:

Midway through, the narrative takes an unexpected turn as the GI begins reminiscing about his childhood best friend, Lee, a Japanese-American and the two boys’ shared desire to fight Germans in Europe. He then notes the irony that, once America actually became involved in the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he went to fight while the equally patriotic Lee was hauled away to an internment camp....

The narrative and imagery of “Everywhere,” both the song and the video, are clearly rooted in the Second World War, as well as the US government’s deplorable treatment of Japanese-Americans during the course of that war. At the same time, the song also obviously stands as a commentary on war in general—in fact, Griffin recounts that he and Trooper wrote the song “at least partly in response to the first Gulf War.”

""Everywhere" (cover of Billy Bragg covering Greg Trooper and Sid Griffin)" (Watch on YouTube)

I might ask myself what I know about war, and the answer is not much, but neither did the people who wrote this song so that's okay. When it comes to having a ball and chain, or being asked to die for your home, or never ever forgiving, I know a little bit, though, and I wrote something that I'll do tomorrow that this is a lead-in for.

On loyalty

So today's Part 2 is a song I wrote myself, "Valor in Tulelake". This is about loyalty, and history, also subjects I really don't know anything about.

""Valor in Tulelake", 2015-04-30" (Watch on YouTube)

Paul Hudak, 1952-2015

Paul Hudak died of leukemia yesterday. Paul was a founding member of the Haskell Committee, and as such, instrumental in creating the programming language that shaped the course of my professional life for 15 years. He was the primary author of the "History of Haskell" paper (PDF), which is a beautiful look at the history of both a set of ideas and the set of people who nurtured and developed those ideas.

I didn't know Paul well, but of course, I took it for granted that he would be one of those people I would keep running into if I kept going to programming languages conferences. When you go to the same academic conference almost every year, you start thinking of the group of people you see there as a family of sorts... with, of course, closer relatives, more distant ones, and the few you awkwardly tiptoe around. In professional communities, as in families, you lose people, but it's never expected -- especially not when somebody is only 62. Especially not, in my case, when it's a person who I was riding a Ferris wheel in Sweden with seven months ago. I knew he had been seriously ill, but at the time I thought he seemed to be recovering. He was, as I recall, quiet, but over dinner, listened to my story of how I left academia without passing judgment on it or me.

I won't implore you all to thank people whose work has meant something to you for it while they're still alive, because after all, we all know why we don't usually do that. It's awkward. Instead I'll just quote from Paul's book The Haskell School of Expression (an intro to programming in Haskell through computer art and music):

Programming, in its broadest sense, is problem solving. It begins when we look out into the world and see problems we want to solve, problems that we think can and should be solved using a digital computer. Understanding the problem well is the first--and probably the most important--step in programming, because without that understanding we may find ourselves wandering aimlessly down a dead-end alley, or worse, down a fruitless alley with no end. "Solving the wrong problem" is a phrase often heard in many contexts, and we certainly don't want to be victims of that crime. So the first step in programming is answering the question, "What problem am I trying to solve?"

I've been down many of those endless alleys in my time as a programmer, but I think it's safe to say that I've avoided some of them because of the work that Paul did and inspired others to do.

Edited to add:
obituary
memorial article in the Yale Daily News; highlights:

“He is the most complete person I have ever seen, embodying qualities that you don’t believe can coexist … extremely kind, patient, gentle yet also super sharp, smart, and creative, and also highly eloquent, and totally cool,” CS professor Zhong Shao said. “He has made enormous impact on so many people in different walks of his life, but most of all, he, by himself, is the best role model which all of us all strive to become. He has certainly influenced me in a very profound way, not just career wise but also how to be a great person.”

and

"During his tenure as department chair from 1999 to 2005, Hudak made an important effort to expand the CS’s diversity, hiring four female senior female professors to a department that had existed for nearly three decades without a single tenured woman, according to CS professor Julie Dorsey."