Hackers Month of Learning Haskell aka X Y Month

The local newspapers are all going crazy about National Novel Writing Month. Apparently NaNoWriMo is some kind of cultural phenomenon in which random people commit to writing 50,000 words in a month, hopefully finishing a (substantial part of a ) novel.

I am not sure any worthwhile novels actually get written this way. If you won't do it anway, you probably won't do it just because other people are also doing it but the idea has its possibilities. The "national" doesn't make sense in a networked world, so we'll replace it with the variable X.

Instead of novel writing we could do something more fun so we'll call it Y.

Let X = { .bunch of adjectives...} Let Y = { ..bunch of verbs.. }.

so we could have "Personal Month Of Derivative Trading" or whatever.

From the nanorimo website,

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

I can certainly think of analogues in programming. many people want to learn Haskell, (say) but never get around to doing it because at any given point of time, there are more important things to do. maybe someone should declare December to be "Hackers Learn Haskell" month and ask anyone participating to write, say, 500 functions in Haskell in a month. Or work through SICP completely. Or whatever.

from the nonwrimo site, Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down..

Programmers write a lot of crap code anyway so at least that part won't be new.