One of the reasons I write is to help me organize my own mind. I have a compulsive need to figure things out and I’ll lay awake at night shuffling sentences around in my head until it hangs together. Then I just have to try to get it all down in Markdown before it dissolves back into chaos. Like a lot of people these days, I am losing a lot of sleep over LLMs and generative AI. I mean that…
This is mainly a note for my future self, but making it a blog post in case it helps anyone else. This weekend, I decided to try making a little SDL3 app on my new M4 MacBook Pro. It took me a few hours to figure out how to get XCode to play nice with the SDL3 framework given MacOS’s paranoia around unsigned code and malware. Here’s the summary for anyone whose Google searching takes…
Let’s say that, like me, you are a person who stares at a computer and writes code for a living. As a straight male who grew up in a time where knitting was very strongly female coded, it for the most part never occurred to me that knitting was a thing I could do and might enjoy. Regardless of your demographic categories and background, it’s possible that you have also not really…
I’m still tinkering on a scripting language for my hobby fantasy console project . I’m ashamed to admit this, but up to this point, the language had absolutely no notion of modules. Literally every source file is dumped into one big global namespace and compiled together. I always planned to have some sort of module system. I just hadn’t figured it out yet because I had other,…
I’ve been noodling on a static type system for my current hobby language. To try to keep the language as simple as possible, I’m trying to see if I can live without subtyping. Since most of my programming experience is in object-oriented languages, I’ve been learning more about languages that lack—or at least claim to lack—subyping, to see how they work. The most…
As I mentioned in the last post , I’m working on taking my little videogame scripting language and turning it into a statically typed one. As much as possible, I’m trying to make the language simple and familiar. But sometimes those goals are in opposition and the most familiar solution to a problem is kind of a mess. So, I’m also exploring novel approaches and delving deeper…
I have this hobby project I’ve been hacking on for several years. It’s a fantasy console, very much inspired by the delightful PICO-8 . Like PICO-8, my console has its own built-in scripting language. Because I’m me, I of course took the opportunity to design an entirely new language. My goal for the project is a fun way to build small-ish 2D games. I want its scripting language…
It’s my 30th birthday, and Megan and I are walking down Duval Street in Key West. There is a pet store here, which must be the most unlikely place for a pet store in all the world. Everyone here is a tourist. What kind of idiot buys a dog while on vacation? You are in the window surrounded by other puppies. A tottering orange ball of fuzz with little triangular ears, like a fox who lost its…
My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago . But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, e-book and PDF versions are done. You can buy it . You can hold it in your hands. And I do mean “hands” plural. Because this little “handbook” turned out way larger than I anticipated: This…
It took three years and 200,000 words more than I expected, but my second book, Crafting Interpreters , is complete. I finished the third draft of the last chapter today, marking the last of around 1,400 days of continuous writing. This book was much harder than my first book , along every axis. It’s larger, more technically complex, much more deeply intertwined, and it had the misfortune of…