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Hah, you could have done worse. The double-dose introduction to stack-based programming via HP calculators and Adobe PostScript in the 90s led me to spend on th
by jasone 4y ago
Hah, you could have done worse. The double-dose introduction to stack-based programming via HP calculators and Adobe PostScript in the 90s led me to spend on the order of 3000 hours developing Onyx (https://github.com/canonware/onyx https://github.com/canonware/onyx), which started off as a PostScript clone minus graphics, and ended up a thing of its own.
On the bright side, I learned a tremendous amount about lexing, interpreters, exceptions, tail-call optimization, data structures, garbage collection, etc., which opened up lots of possibilities in later projects. With the benefit of hard experience I would never recommend using a stack-based language for a large project, but as a learning tool it has some nice qualities.
- bjoli 4y agoFun stuff! I find that the more I find out about PL research and what I myself like in programming, the more I feel constrained in many languages. I find that most of the bugs I write (which are many) are errors in dealing with mutable state. There is always one stupid little detail that leads to bad state. This has led me to dislike the programming language I write the most (probably python, despite really only wanting to write scheme) because it is mutation first. I was also sad to discover that I couldn't write self-recursive procedures in rust because they are never guaranteed to be actually recursive. Did you get anything like that from your work with onyx? (And yes, I believe I have actually has a look at onyx about 10 years ago, back when trying to write poatscript).