snabl

I've been doing pretty much what he describes for three years now, except writing code and sharing it with the world for free [0]. After spending 13 years writing software professionally in everything from major established corporations to consulting and startups. I don't have that many options for health-reasons, and I'm privileged to live with a partner who pulls most of the economic weight. But I can't imagine doing it any other way anymore. [0] https://github.com/codr7/g-fu/tree/master/v1 https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl https://github.com/codr4life/snabl

One of my teachers at university kept repeating that you can't really call yourself a programmer before you've implemented at least one language. I don't know about that, everyone is entitled to an opinion. What I do know is that it's one of precious few things in software that I still find interesting enough to bother [0]. I'm guessing part of the answer is that this is where you end up sooner or later. And then we have the internet, which is a big part of the equation. It's easy to get numb, but I remember a time when information about implementing interpreters/compilers was VERY hard to come by. It's all good from my perspective, we're barely scratching the surface of what is possible and there are plenty of good ideas left to rediscover in our history. But I do wish that more designers would dare to step outside of the box more. Creat

I mean that in certain areas we've recognized and pay tribute to the importance of visualization. But then we fail to make the connection and realize that the same mechanics apply to everything. It's mainly the projection of fear, really. Fear of not fitting in, not having a roof over your head or food on the table, of war, disease, terrorists and so on. It's tricky business to snap out of the collective psychosis, it took me 35 years and I still probably wouldn't have if life hadn't thrown me a banana peel in form of a serious accident. Somewhere deep inside I'm sure almost everyone knows what they would really want to do. But it's too painful, the contrast hurts and it's emotionally tangled up with all the other things that we're not supposed to think about. So we "forget", to fit in. Oh, mostly nostalgia at this point :) I was in the s

I would submit an entry for my own project, Snabl [0]; but it intentionally doesn't support the algorithm since naive recursion beyond a few levels doesn't make much sense in practice. I added a separate keyword to force tail calls since that's usually what you want. [0] https://github.com/codr4life/snabl#function

Same here, I couldn't bring myself to contribute to the current drama for all the money in the world. This crap has to crash an burn first, then I'll be more than happy to help create something better. While I'm waiting; I'm writing the code I always wanted to write just the way I feel like [0]. https://github.com/codr4life/snabl

Static/dynamic is obviously a gradient. I find it a bit sad that it always seems to be either or these days, either no types or a full blown static generic type system. I'm all for the ability to type variables and functions, as long as I'm still allowed to be exactly as precise as I feel like. Many would call that static typing, since there are types in the code that the compiler consumes. But my own attempts [0] at building such languages tell me that the result is still more dynamic than most. [0] https://github.com/codr4life/snabl

I'm not that fond of fancy strings myself, or things like CL's LOOP macro. I prefer real code with composable abstractions. The problem in my mind is that they're not integrated into the host language, and therefore don't compose well with the rest. But that being said, using a simple embedded glue/scripting language that's fully integrated into the host environment makes a lot of sense to me. Emacs Lisp, Autocad, any game engine etc. It's a tried and proven strategy. I started writing my own glue language [0] for C++ since I couldn't find anything simple and integrated enough for my taste. [0] https://github.com/codr4life/snabl

That's about right. And gradual types, multi methods, generics and tight integration with C++: [0]. Dylan was too long winded for my taste, as are most modern attempts. [0] https://github.com/codr4life/snabl