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I got about halfway through it during a slow work week. It was a throwback to my hardware classes from college. It got me thinking differently about computing.

I got about halfway through it during a slow work week. It was a throwback to my hardware classes from college. It got me thinking differently about computing. I am young and stupid, but from a rear-view perspective it looks like maybe certain abstractions were chosen in the old days when there were hardware limitations, and that our current "evolutionary branch" of programming languages has a lot of abstractions that have not aged well, leading to a lot of layers of load-bearing cruft --much like any engineering project. Collapse OS might not be practical today, but it has a "liberating" appeal. Freeing yourself from all these layers of abstraction sounds really enticing. A way to enjoy computing as it existed in the 1960s, but without the terrible developer experience. (or so I imagine) Currently my pie-in-the-sky project would be to work through these projects, get Dusk OS building on a virtual machine, then physical machine, then write a Scheme interpreter for Dusk OS in C --and go hog-wild from there. I have a couple of rivers to cross before I get there. I implemented a Scheme interpreter in Python in a couple of hours, then improved the scanner/Tokenizer in a couple more hours. Now I'm reading through crafting interpreters to see how I would go about implementing a Scheme interpreter in C. After that's done and I implement an interpreter in C, I'll revisit this guide and try to jump headfirst into DuskOS.

sourcepluck 2y ago
Ok, I'm tempted to go back to it, thanks for sharing your experience! I have had some ideas similar to what you describe. I wonder if you've seen https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxntal.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxntal.html. Some of the projects listed here might be of interest to you either https://malleable.systems/catalog/ https://malleable.systems/catalog/
- forth_throwaway 2y ago
  That malleable systems manifesto really resonated with me. I actually did a project recently where I tried to adhere to that sort of ethos: https://pickles976.github.io/Hari-Recipes/ https://pickles976.github.io/Hari-Recipes/ It is nice to see others with similar feelings.
exe34 2y ago
I found this quite easy to follow: https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ for building a not-quite-Scheme in C. I didn't get massively far but only because of the sheer amount of other shiny things.
- forth_throwaway 2y ago
  Yes I have seen that one! It's on my list of resources. There's also this, which I have been studying the code of as I follow along with Crafting Interpreters, to try and incrementally understand the codebase: https://github.com/vibhavp/skeem/blob/master/src/builtins.c#L552 https://github.com/vibhavp/skeem/blob/master/src/builtins.c#... The simplicity of the eval function is so cool!
codr7 2y ago
Famous last words :) I was adding a scripting language to an application, I just needed a scripting language, that was 16 years ago.

sourcepluck 2y ago

Ok, I'm tempted to go back to it, thanks for sharing your experience! I have had some ideas similar to what you describe. I wonder if you've seen https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxntal.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxntal.html. Some of the projects listed here might be of interest to you either https://malleable.systems/catalog/ https://malleable.systems/catalog/

forth_throwaway 2y ago
That malleable systems manifesto really resonated with me. I actually did a project recently where I tried to adhere to that sort of ethos: https://pickles976.github.io/Hari-Recipes/ https://pickles976.github.io/Hari-Recipes/ It is nice to see others with similar feelings.

exe34 2y ago

I found this quite easy to follow: https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/ for building a not-quite-Scheme in C. I didn't get massively far but only because of the sheer amount of other shiny things.

forth_throwaway 2y ago
Yes I have seen that one! It's on my list of resources. There's also this, which I have been studying the code of as I follow along with Crafting Interpreters, to try and incrementally understand the codebase: https://github.com/vibhavp/skeem/blob/master/src/builtins.c#L552 https://github.com/vibhavp/skeem/blob/master/src/builtins.c#... The simplicity of the eval function is so cool!

codr7 2y ago

Famous last words :) I was adding a scripting language to an application, I just needed a scripting language, that was 16 years ago.