Recently I came across this video where a programmer solves the same problem in 6 different programming languages:

https://youtu.be/MKb4WD6mioE

What’s incredibly beautiful are the Haskell and APL solutions. Whereas every other language requires multiple lines, Haskell solves the problem in just one line. And APL is just a few symbols.

Here’s the same guy solving a problem from the Leetcode challenge in a few languages. Once again, it’s pretty neat how the elegance of the solution varies across languages:

This year continued last year’s trend of Sequels, Sanderson, and Science Fiction Magazines. Every series I mentioned last year was a series I continued reading this year - The Expanse, The Asylum Tales, Red Rising, The Dresden Files, The Mogoliad, Wild Cards, and the Illumination Paradox. (The only exception was Red Rising - I’m done with that series after the first trilogy.) I also continued to read sequels in The Wheel of Time, The Powder Mage series, The Just City, and Temeriere. As I did last year, I also read lots of books on electronics and programming as I started to beef up that chunk of my hobbies. As you’ll see if you read my 2020 programming post, this was a good year for me in programming. I also continued trying to catch up with Clarkesworld Magazine.

Thanks to COVID I missed out on the concert where I was going to see Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton. Compared to last year, I also barely bought any music.

This year I switched from using Ampache to listen to my music at work, to using Funkwhale. The more responsive interface has led to me playing a lot more albums as well as doing “artist radio” mode which plays all of an artists’ songs at random. This may have concentrated the scrobbles rather than having them be as random as in the past. That said, I did make good use of Funkwhale’s “Less Listened” radio to keep things fresh. At home I’ve been using Cantata’s “similar artists” dynamic playlists a lot which may also have contributed to a concentration of artists this year.

Twinmaker by Sean Williams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I started out with this book, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it. It seemed to lean a bit heavily on the young adult plot with the love triangle aspect and the whole wanting to be Internet famous subplot. But it turned out those were just there to introduce the reader to the world and provide some stakes for our main character.

Firefight by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this entry to the trilogy more than the first book. I think it might have to do with the fact that most of the world-building took place already. Or maybe it’s because it’s essentially just focused on one mission, giving that mission more narrative room to breathe. I also had fun getting into the weeds with the powers granted by Calamity now that we had the over-arching idea. Sanderson explores ideas of self-control, addiction, power over others, and fear. It ends up being pretty deep for a super-villain/freedom fighter book. I also think Sanderson does a good job of setting up some red herrings, even if the ultimate ending is somewhat easy to predict (then again, it is a YA book).

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dropping the rating from 4 stars (original) to 3 stars (second time through).

This is my second time reading through this book. First time was somewhere between 10-15 years ago. Going through it again, I realized just how much Mr. Pratchett improved as he iterated upon Discworld. Or, perhaps, it’s more accurate to say that this book had a different purpose than later Discworld books. This one is, essentially, a parody of where fantasy had evolved in the decades since The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Pratchett takes tons fantasy tropes, hero’s journey tropes, fish out of water tropes and obliterates them or subverts them. A lot of what he introduces here continues throughout the 30+ book series, but there are places where I’m sure he would have done things differently had he known he’d carry on beyond a couple books.

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another masterwork by Brandon Sanderson in his Cosmere. I will say that, at times, some of the story seemed to drag, particularly character growth of the main characters. But not only is this made up by the incredible payoff at the end (I literally kept waking up the night I finished it as my brain obsessed over the epilogue and what it means for this series and the Cosmere as a whole), but the reader needs to consider this is book 4/10 in a planned series. Even with Sanderson having planned Stormlight as two five-book arcs, that would still mean that the climax of the arc would lie in the next book.

The Red Church by Scott Nicholson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I got this book as part of a Humble Bundle years ago. It was my first occult horror, unless you count Dean Koontz books, which - now that I think about it - seems to share at least some genre space with this book. Quick note for anyone new to my reviews - I use the Goodreads tooltips to inform how many stars I give a book. At the time I’m writing this review, 2 stars is “it was OK”.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second time I’ve read this book. This first time was something around 20 years ago and it was definitely a 5-star book to me at the time. I’d never read anything like it. Reading it in 2020 is very interseting. Some of the things have come true and other, like the Metaverse, seem to be on the cusp of actually happening.
Given the way 2020 is going, Stephenson’s neo-liberalistic view of the world with burbclaves (an idea he continues in The Diamond Age) seems realistic and every time I read about for-profit prisons I think back on this book. Yet, for a book “in the future” it’s just so interesting to see the anachronisms - lack of smart phones, in fact stating that very few folks have computers or internet access, the fact that hackers would necessarily be affected due to being able to understand binary. Not so much anymore - there are many hackers like myself who primarily use higher level languages. Even game designers, who used to be the last holdouts of C are using C++ and C# (in Unity) and even Python-like languages (in Godot).

Apex Magazine Promo Issue 2020 by Jason Sizemore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mini issue to get folks ready for the relaunch of Apex Magazine. I truly enjoyed the stories in here and I can’t wait until the next real issue in January. Below is what I thought of each story:

The Legacy of Alexandria: a dystopia with elements of afro-futurism that seems every so prescient with the moment we’re in right now. The biggest bummer of the author now being an editor in Apex is that the magazine won’t be graced with this work for the foreseeable future.