Mutable Thoughts

- December 28, 2019

A New URL

Up until now, the address of this site has always been IsaiahHines.com. I bought the address years ago, and I’ve been using my github repository to host the content so that I have full control to experiment with layouts, navigation, and content. And the only real expense is the $15 a year to renew the URL from ionos.com… And my time - that’s an expense too, but it’s worth the enjoyment I’ve gained and the things I’ve learned.

I was having a conversation about URLs yesterday and it got me thinking that most people don’t use their name as their website address. I think this is for several reasons:

1. It can be hard to reserve your name as a URL, either because someone else may already be using it or because it is being treated as a premium address in anticipation of somebody willing to shell out big bucks to purchase it.
2. A name is often less catchy than a two or three word phrase and it’s fun to come up with a nickname to use as an online persona.
3. The things we write about often have a theme to them. It’s more convenient from a reader’s POV if the address relates to that theme in some way.

Given these above reasons, and in the spirit of mixing things up, I’ve changed my URL to MutableThoughts.com. There are a couple reasons I chose this name. The first dozen or so reasons are because the other names I came up with were already taken or were too expensive. :) That being said, I’m pretty happy with where I’ve landed. Right now this website mostly contains posts with content of whatever I was feeling like writing about at the time. These ideas are not immutable - they can and will change as time goes on. And so Mutable Thoughts seems an appropriate description of what this website contains.

Mutable

Mutability and immutability is a common programming concept that is of great importance in several languages. In Python, numbers, strings, tuples, and ranges are immutable and therefore code can rely on values of these types to remain unchanged. And, in c++, there’s a special mutable keyword that is used to indicate that a class member value can be modified, even in cases where the class itself is advertizing that it is constant and immutable. The mutable keyword also shows up in c++ lambdas if you want to be able to change the value of captured variables from within the lambda.