This post is excellent. It’s as thorough and methodical as it is damning.
With any level of power or authority, there must also come commensurate responsibility. Failure to acknowledge the power dynamics created by your authority over others should be an immediate disqualifier.
RMS and those like him have no place representing a group as broad and diverse as the free software community.
Since I very first started learning to code something I’ve always wanted to do was create my own programming language, however it always seemed like an incredibly daunting task.
I could never quite figure out exactly how to get started until I read a tremendous post by YellowAfterLife. This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever read and I’ve gone through it multiple times. At this point it’s my go-to sample project for familiarizing myself with a new language once I get past Hello World. Skip several years later and I finally stumble across the truly exceptional Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom — which I urge you to check out if you find this post interesting.
I’ve been filling my head with all kinds of background on this stuff for years but thus far I had yet to get my own language implementation off the ground from scratch… until now that is.
For the past month or so I’ve been working on implementing my very own language called Umpteen, the name a reference to the amount of times I’ve started and restarted such a project. Today the language is sophisticated enough to express programs such as implementing a working Brainfuck interpreter or recursively calculating fibonacci numbers.
It’s definitely a work-in-progress still, but I’m insanely happy with my progress so far. Now that I’ve sufficiently proven to myself that the language is turing complete, my next major goal is to write a self-hosted compiler for the language. I’ve already started prototyping a self-hosted lexer and I’ve got a working proof of concept which can tokenize the program print(100); It’s not much but it’s a start! Journey of a thousand miles, single step and all that.
I’ve been having a ton of fun working on it, so I hope you’ll consider checking out the project over on GitHub: https://github.com/347Online/umpteen
If you decide to give the language a try I’d love nothing more than to hear from you so feel free to drop me a line via email or Mastodon
That’s all for now, but I hope to cover more about the language here in the near future so stay tuned!
It was always a really dumb term, endlessly mocked, but there’s a certain unabashed fun to it I think.
I’ve been through more blogging platforms and set up than I care to recount over my time spent online lo these many years, but I basically fell off of it really when I kinda went all-in on the bird site without really meaning to. In 2020 I stopped using the site almost completely, and recently finally ended up deactivating my account entirely (you can follow me on Mastodon, if you like).
I’ve been trying to spend less time on the Algorithmically-Curated platforms like YouTube, and invest more of my time and energy into the open web.
So I have a blog again. Watch this space for posts about programming, idle musings, it’s likely gonna be a real grab bag. The very next post you see here is probably going to be about a little project I’ve been working on over the last month, so stay tuned for that, I think it’s gonna be really cool.
Thanks for checking out my little corner of the World Wide Web
Catch ya later!