C and H

I'm ploughing through the C++ tutorials here.

It's a very elegant language, more abstract than BASIC or Pascal, and certainly more gnomic in it's form. I'm still a bit vague on classes and OOP - and I have no intention ever of using recursion - but it's surprising how quickly it all comes back.

Arrays, pointers, types of loop, linked lists, binary trees...most of the concepts in programming are almost the same as they were 25 years ago.
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I'm seeing H tomorrow. There's no decent films on at the moment, so I imagine we'll be sitting in a pub, disagreeing about things we almost agree about.
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I am only impressed by things I can't do or don't understand.

I envied people who could sing, until I started singing myself. Now I only envy people who sing well. I was only interested in religion until I understood why people believed it, and why all religions are functionally identical. Once, I searched for a faith worth embracing, now they all seem equally tedious and childish.

Mnemonic memory tricks fail to impress because I know how they're done, but magic tricks are still intriguing because I haven't studied magic.

Ideology as encoded in film and television serials seemed a fascinating subject for study while I was at university. Now that I know the subject quite well - though I'm certainly not a great expert - the 'deeper meanings' in television drama seem obvious and incoherent.

Oh there's still plenty around to impress. Mathematics, physics, biology and earth sciences. Dialectical logic and history. Aspects of acoustics, and many parts of music theory.

Actually, bricklaying and coalmining are two subjects that I know almost nothing about. Next to cryptography and the finer details of evolution.

They're all interesting. It's just that the mundane seems to have been exhausted.