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First Car

First Car (thrig.me)

For thrig, in a LISP program; for me, the '81 Civic I bought from my dad for $500 and drove for a couple of years before my foot went through the floor, literally, at a snowy intersection in the middle of winter. Years of west-coast winter driving by my parents when I was young, before we moved east. Out there, heavy salt use, and with no protective coating on the undercarriage, rust is basically inevitable.

At point-of-catastrophic-failure the car was almost 20 years old, and in retrospect, it's a little shocking it lasted so long.

Luckily, there was nobody else at the four-way stop. I drove it across the intersection, got it to stop via the handbrake, parked it at the edge of a crescent, and left it. We got it towed later, sold it to an auto dealer my dad knew for a couple hundred bucks. He obviously fixed it up: for a year or two after, we'd occasionally see its rusty brown frame and university stickers on the back window when we were driving around town.

Oh, LISP? My first car would've been in January, 2006. My doomed grad studies. Taking a class in programming language design and implementation, and we were using Scheme (specifically, Chez Scheme). The rest of my time there might've been miserable, but that class was incredible. I got an A+. Scheme is still my favourite language, the one I love even if I don't use it for anything anymore. C++, Lua, Python are my pragmatic go-tos, and they're varying degrees of "fine", but programming in those languages doesn't feel as enjoyable in the same way it does with Scheme, with Lua probably the closest, and at least Python tries.

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