I went to write my last journal entry and I was just so bored that I couldn't think what to write. I left my room to go to the bathroom ... I noticed how cold it was outside my room. I stretched. I felt the warmth of the lightbulb. I then realized what I wanted to do ---- learn xlib enough to make a few little visual hacks that I'd been craving to write for the past month or so. It's been a long time since I've been proficient in a language/toolkit that let me do graphics.
When I first started programming there was good old "GR" and "HGR" in Apple II Basic. That was kinda cool. Then I had GWBasic and QuickBasic ... QBasic let me do all sorts of fun graphics stuff. Oh, but then Borland Turbo C ..... graphics, mouse, sound, you name it... damn that was fun. After that I got hired to port a DOS app to Windows, using Visual Basic... that sucked for graphics. It was great for widgets, sure, but not fun little graphics hacks.
Java is damn fun, but I haven't used it in awhile.
So, I'm gonna play with xlib tonight. There are so many more important things I should be doing, but I just don't care.
There's nothing more useless to learn than xlib, but goddamnit, I'm gonna. It'll wake me up and pull me out of this stupor, then I'll be productive.
I think the real reason is that I just get off writing in C/C++. You can only code in interpretted languages so long before you finally snap.