Waiting...
So while I'm waiting for the interview, some random words that popped into my head last night while sleep-deprived:

Cryptoglossia n. Secret speech, conversation in code; e.g. "The blue dog howls at midnight," or the dialogue of secret in-jokes between lovers.

Eschatolalic adj. n. One who rambles incoherently about the end of the world; the madman on the street shouting that the end is near, or on occasion a politician's speech.

Ichthyopneia n, infl. form: pl. same as sing. An (intrinsically) nonexistent thing, or a dream-thing; like a box of moonbeams, or a lost city.

...and dammit, I'm really wondering when I'll get that call back...

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Step 1, complete.
First interview (with the HR people) went well. This Thursday: Technical interview.

So now: Going to go pick up the Big Book O' Algorithms and read through it. And refresh my memory on C++.

*crossing fingers*

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In explanation...
The previous post on words came out of a half-dazed idea for a game. (As in, I was half-dazed at the time...) A bunch of Greek words of the sort that can be used in English are written on cards and placed in a hat. Words that can only be used as prefices are marked as such, like "eu-" ("good"), but other words are just given in their full form. ("logos") Each card has Greek text, English rendering, and possibly notes on meaning.

Then everyone takes turns drawing two cards out of the hat and assembling an interesting word out of them, defining the word and using it in a sentence or telling a short story to illustrate its use and meaning. Bonus points for style. This game should probably be played while drunk.

So the words in the previous post were some imaginings of what might come up under these circumstances.

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Yeesh....
...I'd forgotten what a crawling horror C++ is. It would be really, really nice to create a good, portable version of the Objective-C standard library (the Foundation Kit) that would let this become a language of choice for more than just OS X.

But I suppose nowadays everyone wants to code Java instead. Which, I'll confess, solves some of the problems of C++, but it seems to leave a lot of the basic nonsense intact. As Hans has pointed out: The beauty of Objective-C comes from the fact that almost no "boilerplate" is necessary. Your code simply does the things it needs to do. C++ and Java both require a great deal of code that's just doing routine tasks like making sure exception handling is working properly. A great deal of repetition, more opportunity for bugs, and code becomes an illegible mess. Ultimately, both of these languages have the feel of early attempts - a lot of radical new ideas (in each), but they really don't feel like final, production-quality products. Objective-C does. It's an amazing difference.

Mrph. OK, end of rant.

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