Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

UTF Ultrawide

Update: I now have a basic interpreter that does numbers, bindings, functions (and function calls), and a special type of function that I have been told looks a lot like fexpressions. Also basic arithmetic, and some (most?) of the syntactic sugar has been implemented in the parser.

I'm finally starting to work on my language design project for real! It borrows a lot of ideas from the Lisp world, though with more (familiar) syntax sugar and significantly less parens.

Some of the goals include dynamic typing but strictness in a few well-selected (albeit unconventional) places such as mutability, discouraging 'clever' and fragile code, and having a very small amount of 'fixed' core language mechanisms with the rest of the 'standard library' being separately versioned (modularly, not monolithically).

The end result will hopefully be a language that is both easy to pick up, *and* easy to reason about and maintain, with a minimal amount of semantics to learn, internal capability security, and able to run in a wide variety of environments (including embedded) despite the use of a garbage collector.

Non-goals include static typing, rigid adherence to existing paradigms, emulating existing languages, and supporting corporate use.

@robinhood As an addendum to this: it can be hard to distinguish whether someone has changed for the better, or whether they've just gotten better at hiding it.

My personal benchmark for this, that I've found to work quite well: are they 1) acknowledging what they did wrong, and 2) demonstrating an understanding of *why* it is wrong, eg. what harm it has caused?

If someone pretends that the bad thing never happened, or shows no understanding of why it's bad, their promises to do better are not really worth anything; there's no reason to believe that they *will* do better.

But if someone shows that they understand the harm and how to avoid it the next time, they will get the benefit of the doubt from me; when the inputs change, the results are also likely to change.

(I usually overtly state to people that this is my benchmark, and it has spurred some people to actually do the work of understanding the problem and improve, too.)

(Aimed at someone else) "Well you should have expected to have to field questions about your weird bio, otherwise why put it there? You must be setting yourself up to get mad at people"

Have you considered that, y'know, not everything revolves around you and your understanding of someone's identity?

Have you considered that they might not give a shit about whether you understand it, and were expressing themselves for their own enjoyment, and you are the asshole crashing the party by demanding Justifications about something that wasn't For You to begin with?

This sort of shit really pisses me off, as if existing in public somehow comes with a built-in obligation to be understandable to ignorant cishet dudes. Like, no, fuck off, gaining understanding is YOUR job.