Reinventing the Wheel

Sure, there's existing code. Somebody Else's Code. It works fine, maybe not as fast as you'd like, or the interface isn't quite right. That's how it often is with me and SRFI-13. Olin Shivers is a skilled Schemer, back when that wasn't cool (OK, it's still not cool), but some of his APIs enshrined in early SRFIs drive me a little nuts, and the implementation is slow because it's so generalized.

So after a few false starts and failed tests, I now have these pretty things: (updated 2020-11-10, enforced hstart, hend boundaries)

;; Returns index of `needle` in `haystack`, or #f if not found.
;; `cmp`: Comparator. Default `char=?`, `char-ci=?` is the most useful alternate comparator.
;; `hstart`: Starting index, default 0.
;; `hend`: Ending index, default (- haystack-length needle-length)
(define string-find (case-lambda
    [(haystack needle)  (string-find haystack needle char=? 0 #f)]
    [(haystack needle cmp)  (string-find haystack needle cmp 0 #f)]
    [(haystack needle cmp hstart)  (string-find haystack needle cmp hstart #f) ]
    [(haystack needle cmp hstart hend)
        (let* [ (hlen (string-length haystack))  (nlen (string-length needle)) ]
            (set! hstart (max 0 (min hstart (sub1 hlen))))
            (unless hend (set! hend (fx- hlen nlen)))
            (set! hend (max 0 (min hend hlen)) )
            (if (or (fxzero? hlen) (fxzero? nlen))
                #f
                (let loop [ (hi hstart)  (ni 0) ]
                    ;; assume (< ni nlen)
                    ;(errprintln "hi=" hi ", ni=" ni ", hsub=" (substr haystack hi hlen) ", bsub=" (substr needle ni nlen))
                    (cond
                        [(cmp (string-ref haystack (fx+ hi ni)) (string-ref needle ni))  (set! ni (fx+ ni 1))
                            ;; end of needle?
                            (if (fx>=? ni nlen)  hi  (loop hi ni) )
                        ]
                        [else  (set! hi (fx+ hi 1))
                            ;; end of haystack?
                            (if (fx>? hi hend)  #f  (loop hi 0) )
                        ]
        ))))
    ]
))

;; Test whether 'haystack' starts with 'needle'.
(define (string-has-prefix? haystack needle)
    (let [ (i (string-find haystack needle char=? 0 0)) ]
        (and i (fxzero? i))
))

;; Test whether 'haystack' ends with 'needle'.
(define (string-has-suffix? haystack needle)
    (let* [ (hlen (string-length haystack))  (nlen (string-length needle))
            (i (string-find haystack needle char=? (fx- hlen nlen)))
        ]
        (and i (fx=? i (fx- hlen nlen)))
))

Written for Chez Scheme, caveat implementor. BSD license, do what thou wilt. If you find a bug, send me a failing test case.

I don't normally bother with fx (fixnum) operations, but in tight loops it makes a difference over generic numeric tower +, etc.

Racket CS 7.8

Big plus: ARM64 support!

Big minus: Neither DRRacket nor any built .app launches on the Mac, you have to call them from command line. Gross incompetence & zero testing.

My basic gridtest.rkt demo still takes 100ms to render a frame, needs to be <16ms. But that's interpreting from the shell, and I may look and see if they have a more efficient graphics API.

The bigger problem is that compiling doesn't work with packages, or at least I don't have the right magic invocations:

% cat build.zsh
#!/bin/zsh

rm -rf build
mkdir build
# Windows: --ico foo.ico
# Mac: --icns foo.icns
time raco exe --cs --gui ++lib memoize ++lib rsound ++lib portaudio -o build/gridtest gridtest.rkt

% ./build.zsh && ./build/gridtest.app/Contents/MacOS/gridtest
raco exe --cs --gui ++lib memoize ++lib rsound ++lib portaudio -o    39.14s user 2.40s system 87% cpu 47.390 total
ffi-lib: could not load foreign library
  path: libportaudio.2.dylib
  system error: dlopen(libportaudio.2.dylib, 6): image not found
  context...:
   raise-dll-error
   .../ffi/unsafe.rkt:131:0: get-ffi-lib
   call-in-empty-metacontinuation-frame
   proc
   call-in-empty-metacontinuation-frame
   body of '#%embedded:portaudio/portaudio:
   temp35_0
   run-module-instance!
   [repeats 6 more times]
   perform-require!
   call-in-empty-metacontinuation-frame
   eval-one-top
   eval-compiled-parts
   embedded-load
   proc
   call-in-empty-metacontinuation-frame

Well, that's fucked. 40 seconds and a fuck you because it doesn't bring in the dylib it needs.

Obviously I could just say "install Racket, run this script", but that's lame and distributes source, which in a real game I don't want to do.

LISP Machines

I really wish we had a front-end to software even half as useful as this in the 21st C, but technology has regressed massively since the '80s and '90s. Some of the old IDEs, before they became bloated "enterprise" software (because giant mega-corporations paid for them, not individual programmers, so the IDE makers serve their paymasters), started to slouch towards this kind of usefulness but fast and small. CodeWarrior, Project Builder/Interface Builder, Borland's Turbo Whatever.

emacs isn't the answer, it's an abandonment of the question; "modern" emacs turned away from the LM zmacs model, it's now just a terrible LISP interpreter with a bad text-only-editor front end; you can make tools in it, but nobody sane will want to use them. I'm perfectly comfortable with the emacs editing keys (well, obviously, Macs use emacs keys for all text areas), but the machinery in it is just broken.

I get excited about Chez Scheme having a nice REPL, with history and can edit multi-line blocks in the REPL, unlike the crappy readline almost every other Scheme uses. But it doesn't do hypertext, it doesn't do graphics, it barely has tab completion (procedure names only), it doesn't have any inline documentation & source inspector; all of those were in the LISP Machine.

When I'm working, I have my text editor (BBEdit or Atom mostly), a terminal with the REPL running and I copy-paste to it, 3-4 PDFs open (R6RS, R6RS-lib, CSUG, sometimes TSPL), and a web browser pointed at the SRFIs. If the Internet connection went down, I'd have to search the SRFI sources to figure out what's in there. I really need a better tool for this.

DrRacket can do some graphics inline, and the tab completion shows documentation hints in the top right corner, but as I note every time, it doesn't really have a REPL because it destroys the interactive environment every time you edit code; utterly useless for code exploration. And in practice, Racket is really horrifyingly slow; it does fine in focused benchmarks but real-world use it just falls over drooling.

The graphics part's sort of irrelevant, and sort of not; the way the LISP Machine worked was getting a "presentation" form for an object, which would render as text or drawings or images, and interacting with it sent messages back to that object. That's probably out of scope for anything except a complete new OS and terminal. A simplistic number-tagged hypertext would be good enough and orders of magnitude easier.

So. I'm not sure what to do here, I don't want to just complain about tools and not do anything about them. I could try to extract the docs to make a hypertext doc system; a lot of text processing on TeX source sounds painful, and a one-off job, I want a more universal solution. It may be possible to hook into Chez's completion to call a help system. Or it could be a standalone program that you feed several doc sources into, and it lets you search against them. Dash does that, but it's Mac and C/Objective-C primarily, and does poorly at other docsets.

Scheme-Test-Unit

Moving my library from Chicken to Chez (when I moved it from Chez to Chicken originally, it was much smaller and I only used a few asserts to test), I discovered that:

  1. Chicken's test egg is pretty nice but non-standard.
  2. SRFI-64 (from Thunderchez ) is OK as far as it goes, but has an inadequate test runner (the default just lists PASS/FAIL with no explanation for each test, and has one total). Ridiculous when you have dozens or hundreds of tests.
  3. There's no good alternative. There's a SchemeUnit which is for PLT Scheme née Racket, and a couple others which aren't SRFI-64 and aren't for Chez.

So I ended up writing my own:

Here's how it works:

#!/usr/bin/env scheme-script
;; example-test.ss

(import (chezscheme)
    (srfi s64 testing) ;; thunderchez
    (scheme-test-unit)
)

(define (all-tests)
(test-group "All Tests"

(test-group "Math"
    (test-equal "add" 4 (+ 2 3))
)

(test-group "Strings"
    (test-equal "append" "foobar" (string-append "foo" "bar"))
)

) ;; test group "All Tests"
) ;; all-tests

(define (main argv)
    (scheme-test-configure argv)
    (all-tests)
)

(main (command-line-arguments))

----
% chmod 755 example-test.ss
% ./example-test.ss --help
Usage: scheme-test-configure [-v|--verbose|-q|--quiet|-o FILENAME|--output FILENAME]
% ./example-test.ss
*** All Tests START
*** Math START
- add [(+ 2 3)] expected <<<5>>> but got <<<4>>>
*** Math END, PASS: 0 / FAIL: 1
*** Strings START
+ append [(string-append foo bar)]
*** Strings END, PASS: 1 / FAIL: 0
*** All Tests END, PASS: 0 / FAIL: 0
FINAL PASS: 1 / FAIL: 1

My own test cases come out:

% ./marklib-test.ss -q
*** Control END, PASS: 4 / FAIL: 0
*** Logic END, PASS: 12 / FAIL: 0
*** Math END, PASS: 18 / FAIL: 0
*** Strings END, PASS: 29 / FAIL: 0
*** Any END, PASS: 31 / FAIL: 0
*** Hashtable END, PASS: 9 / FAIL: 0
*** List END, PASS: 6 / FAIL: 0
*** Maybe END, PASS: 6 / FAIL: 0
*** Stack END, PASS: 10 / FAIL: 0
*** Vector END, PASS: 8 / FAIL: 0
*** Data Structures END, PASS: 0 / FAIL: 0
*** Dice END, PASS: 7 / FAIL: 0
*** All Tests END, PASS: 0 / FAIL: 0
FINAL PASS: 140 / FAIL: 0

Green Window Means Thunderchez is Working

This weekend, I wanted to have dynamic access to SDL for some interactive graphing, and again ran into the problem from More Fun and Swearing with Scheme. With more experienced eyes, I read the Chez Scheme User's Guide and discovered everything I'd done wrong a year+ ago.

First, install Thunderchez somewhere, I just put it in ~/Code/CodeChezScheme

In particular, read ffi-utils.sls which provides somewhat easier wrapping of binary flags; thunderchez is a very low-level port.

Second, install SDL2, I used port install libsdl2 and that puts it in /opt/local/lib, but in production I'll use a local dir. Read the SDL2 API for reference.

Took me a few hours to translate the basic functions I needed, and now I have:

sdltest.ss:

#!/usr/bin/env scheme-script
;; sdltest.ss
;; Copyright © 2020 by Mark Damon Hughes. All Rights Reserved.

(import (chezscheme)
    (sdl2)  ;; thunderchez
)

;; Set this to your location. I used `port install libsdl2`, YMMV.
;; In production, I'll use a local dir with libs.
(load-shared-object "/opt/local/lib/libSDL2.dylib")

(define kWindowWidth 320)
(define kWindowHeight 240)

(define gWindow #f)
(define gRender #f)
(define gState 'quit)

(define (gr-init title x y w h)
    (sdl-set-main-ready)
    (sdl-init sdl-initialization-everything)
    (set! gWindow (sdl-create-window title x y w h (sdl-window-flags 'shown 'allow-highdpi)) )
    (set! gRender (sdl-create-renderer gWindow -1 (sdl-renderer-flags 'accelerated)) )
    (sdl-show-window gWindow)
    (sdl-raise-window gWindow)
)

(define (gr-event)
    (make-ftype-pointer sdl-event-t (foreign-alloc (ftype-sizeof sdl-event-t)))
)

(define (gr-rect x y w h)
    (let [ (rect (make-ftype-pointer sdl-rect-t (foreign-alloc (ftype-sizeof sdl-rect-t)))) ]
        (ftype-set! sdl-rect-t (x) rect x)
        (ftype-set! sdl-rect-t (y) rect y)
        (ftype-set! sdl-rect-t (w) rect w)
        (ftype-set! sdl-rect-t (h) rect h)
        rect
))

(define (gr-mainloop)
    (let [ (event (gr-event)) ]
        (let mainloop []
            ;; event
            (sdl-poll-event event)
            (let [ (evt-type (ftype-ref sdl-event-t (type) event)) ]
                (cond
                    [(eqv? evt-type (sdl-event-type 'quit))  (set! gState 'quit)]
                    [(eq? gState 'main)  (main-event evt-type event) ]
                ))
            ;; TODO: loop polling until no event left
            ;; update
            (case gState
                [(main)  (main-update) ]
            )
            ;; render
            (sdl-render-clear gRender)
            (case gState
                [(main)  (main-render) ]
            )
            (sdl-render-present gRender)
            ;; loop
            ;; TODO: wait timer, currently burns CPU
            (unless (eq? gState 'quit) (mainloop))
    ))
    (gr-shutdown)
)

(define (gr-shutdown)
    (sdl-quit)
)

(define (main-event evt-type event)
    #f ;; no event handling yet
)

(define (main-update)
    #f ;; no updates yet
)

(define (main-render)
    (sdl-set-render-draw-color gRender 0 255 0 255) ;; green
    (sdl-render-fill-rect gRender (gr-rect 0 0 kWindowWidth kWindowHeight))
)

(define (main argv)
    (gr-init "Hello, Thunderchez!" 100 100 kWindowWidth kWindowHeight)
    (set! gState 'main)
    (gr-mainloop)
)

(main (command-line-arguments))

To start it I just need:

% CHEZSCHEMELIBDIRS=thunderchez-trunk: ./sdltest.ss

Green window means it's working! And it can be closed with the window close button or Cmd-Q, but menu or other events don't work yet.

So… to port my graphics library from Chicken to Chez is probably a week's work, maybe less—I only fill rects, blit images, play sounds, and read a few events. My sound support on Chicken is minimal because the maintainer didn't bother to port the audio API, I had to do that myself.

Rehosting my game on Chez is an unknowably difficult debugging problem, but I code in a way that's usually portable. Large chunks of my large marklib library exist only to work around the non-portable parts and missing features of R5RS.

But the advantages are:

  1. Chez's R6RS is a better language than Chicken's R5RS++/R7RS-not-really.
  2. Chez is much faster, sometimes just 10-25%, sometimes hundreds of times, even compiled.
  3. Chez's JIT compiler is fast and invisible. Working on Chez is instant gratification. Chicken has a 30-second compile before I see anything, which has been impossibly frustrating.

At the very least, if I get my graphics library ported I can do the graphing I wanted last weekend.

Perilar: Dark Weaver

Perilar was my favorite of my games, an original iPhone RPG (loosely inspired by Rogue, Ultima, & Zelda). Alas, the App Store is a pain in the ass to stay current in, and Perilar needed updates I wasn't willing to jump thru Apple's hoops to deliver, so it's been gone from the store for a few years. Does anyone even remember me?

Then I wrote & released Brigand, a stripped-down realtime roguelike, which apparently everyone got mad at either because it was too hard (it was, but I liked that), or cost $9.99 which is SO MUCH MONEY on the goddamned App Store. And again the App Store made it obsolete and it wasn't reasonable to update it.

So I got back to a new desktop version of Perilar. I wrote a JS prototype (Fallen Kingdom) that wasn't fast enough to be usable, but let me rapidly test a bunch of new things. Now in Scheme, after a very long time, I have a nice, fast, nearing-complete sequel to Perilar: Dark Weaver.

Where I am right now:

  • World has both hand-designed and random sectors, tho the latter need some smoothing out to look like real terrain. I can walk across the world, at least until I hit impassable sectors. Porting my complex map and dungeon generators in is the next task. I have spent the last 6 months building features in the Town of Amity, and I'm ready to move on!
  • Most of the tile art is from the DawnLike set, with a lot of customization and new art where needed, and I've stuck to the DawnLike palette, it really has a nice old-timey look, a little less garish than the Atari 800, brighter than C64.
  • Player art isn't going to be these sprites, but the paperdolls I have are 2-facing (East/West), and I'd prefer 4- or 8-facing (you can move diagonally!); so I still need to find or draw (oh no) those.
  • NPCs have dialogue trees, stores, and special abilities (like the Innkeeper healing you; they're not super-powered).
  • Combat, with multiple attack/defense options, works in my test area. I haven't spread monsters around the sectors yet, but they've been developed and tested in the JS prototype.
  • Loot is extensive, magical weapons and armor have all the complex options you'd expect. I'm being a hardass on encumbrance in this one, because you can drop loot anywhere and come back for it. (Not quite the hardest possible ass; gold doesn't count towards weight, which it does in tabletop RPGs!)
  • Spells beyond Magic Missile are not implemented at all yet; will probably ship with only the dozen basic spells from the original release, and advanced spells added in an update. You won't find anyone to teach those for a long time anyway. Despite that, Wizards are still useful with magic wands.
  • New bosses, boss arenas, deeper dungeons, main quest, and sidequests.
  • At least one sector will be user-modifiable, tho I don't know if it'll be in the first release. You can buy furniture and walls, and fix up your own town. There's useful things you'll be able to get from that. (The building mechanic half works now; gathering doesn't).
  • Currently tested on Mac, should be buildable with no or very few changes to Windows, Linux, BSD, etc., but I need to get proper test environments for all of those.
  • Will be for sale on itch.io sometime this year. Price TBD.

I feel super awkward about self-promotion, but I do have a Patreon, and for Gold level you'll get betas; I haven't explained this, but at any level, when you've paid up whatever the cover price of the game ends up being, you'll get a full release license for it, too.

darkweaver-2020-01-08-2
darkweaver-2020-01-08-3

Adult Engineer Over-Optimization as the Motie Problem

Looking at my Scheme code and the way I customize it, I'm starting to see the real reason evil megacorps (and wannabe evil startups) won't hire even middle-aged programmers or use your favorite weirdo language, they just want young idiots who code Java or Go.

If you think about a standard software career, there's maybe 10 years of a submissive fool badly coding crap languages ^1 like Java, Go ^3, PHP, JavaScript ^4. They just got out of college or self-trained, and can barely copy existing algorithms, let alone think of one for themselves. This is why FizzBuzzTest ^5 is such a good novice coder test: It requires following directions exactly, and slightly competent logic skills, but not much more.

Then maybe 10 years of them being project managers and "architects", running waterfall and GANTT charts; they'll say they're "agile" but then have a giant JIRA repo of "backlog" features which have to be implemented before shipping, weekly 4-hour planning "backlog grooming" meetings, and unrealistic estimates. This is sufficient to build all kinds of horrible vertical prisons of the mind like Azkaban Facebook.

Then they either retire, or are "downsized", and now what? So they work on their own code, do maintenance on old systems, or leave the industry entirely.

If they work on their own, freed of evil megacorp constraints, they're going to end up in something idiosyncratic and expressive, like Scheme, LISP, Forth, or a custom language. Make their own weirdo environment that's perfectly fit to themself, and unusable/unreadable by anyone else.

Case in point, I needed an object model. There's one I like in Gerbil, and Gerbil's blazing fast, but I can't make a full SDL2 library for it yet (Gambit's FFI is hard, I've hit some bugs, and there's a LOT of library to interface to), and I'm using a bunch of other Chickenisms anyway, so I can't really move to it yet. Instead I just made my own simple object libary, with a couple macros to hide the ugly reality behind it:

(test-group "Object"
    (test "Object" 'Object (class-name Object))
    (let [ (obj (@new Object))  (bug #f)  (cow #f)  (duck #f) ]
        (test "Object-to-string" "[Object]" (@call obj 'to-string))

        (define-class Animal Object)
        (define-field Animal 'legs 0)
        (define-field Animal 'color #f)
        (define-method Animal 'init (self legs color)
            (set! (@field self 'legs) legs)
            (set! (@field self 'color) color) )
        (define-method Animal 'speak (self)
            (sprintf "The ~A ~A with ~A legs says " (@field self 'color) (class-name (@class self)) (@field self 'legs)) )

        (set! bug (@new Animal 6 "green"))
        (test "bug-legs" 6 (@field bug 'legs))
        (test "bug-color" "green" (@field bug 'color))
        (test "Bug speak" "The green Animal with 6 legs says " (@call bug 'speak))

        (define-class Cow Animal)
        (define-method Cow 'init (self color)
            (@super self 'init 4 color) )
        (define-method Cow 'speak (self)
            (string-append (@super self 'speak) "MOO!") )
        (set! cow (@new Cow "brown"))

        ;; second class to make sure classes don't corrupt shared superclass
        (define-class Duck Animal)
        (define-method Duck 'init (self color)
            (@super self 'init 2 color) )
        (define-method Duck 'speak (self)
            (string-append (@super self 'speak) "QUACK!") )
        (set! duck (@new Duck "black"))

        (test "Cow speak" "The brown Cow with 4 legs says MOO!" (@call cow 'speak))
        (test "Cow to string" "[Cow color:brown;legs:4]" (@call cow 'to-string))
        (test "Duck speak" "The black Duck with 2 legs says QUACK!" (@call duck 'speak))
        (test "Duck to string" "[Duck color:black;legs:2]" (@call duck 'to-string))

        (test "instance-of?" #t (instance-of? cow Cow))
        (test "instance-of? parent" #t (instance-of? cow Animal))
        (test "instance-of? grandparent" #t (instance-of? cow Object))
        (test "instance-of? cousin-false" #f (instance-of? cow Duck))
        (test "instance-of? not an obj-false" #f (instance-of? "wtf" Cow))
    )
)

The implementation code's not much longer than the tests, but it's not quite done for me to show off; I need to switch my macros into non-hygeinic forms so I can get rid of the (self) in define-method, and introduce an Objective-C-like _cmd field for self-reflection, and message-not-understood handling. There's always more tinkering to do.

Which is great for me, but makes my code an undocumented (mostly) new language, unusable by anyone normal. A giant pile of crap Java program, no matter how old, can be "worked on" (more crap piled on top) by any teenage Bro Coder.

All of which brought to mind The Mote in God's Eye, where the Motie Engineers over-optimize everything into a tangled mess, and the Watchmaker vermin are even worse, wiring up everything to everything to make new devices. The threat posed by and solution to Scheme programmers, in your usual authoritarian megacorp scenario, is similar to Watchmakers.


^1 Swift is intended to fit this niche much more than weirdo expressive Smalltalk+C Objective-C was, BDSM ^2 to prevent one from writing "bad" code, but it's not there yet; the reality of low-level software dev can't be simplified as much as Apple wants, and their C++ developers weren't up to the task anyway.

^2 Bondage-Domination-Sado-Masochism; aka strict type systems and code flow analysis, that prevent one from writing "bad" code at the cost of annotating everything with types instead of doing useful work. I'm not kink-shaming people who do that for sex, only those who do it to their own software.

^3 Rob Pike has openly said they can't give a powerful language to newbie Googlers, they mostly just know Java, C, C++, which is why Go is so limited and generic.

^4 Oddly, JS is basically a LISP with really shitty syntax. It's easy to make trivial, broken junk in it, but it's also powerful and expressive if you're an old maniac who understands the Self-based object system.

^5 Oh, fine, but only so I can demonstrate something:

(define (fizzbuzz-test i n s)  (if (zero? (modulo i n))  (begin (display s) #t)  #f) )
(define (fizzbuzz i)
    (unless (any identity (list (fizzbuzz-test i 3 'Fizz) (fizzbuzz-test i 5 'Buzz)))  (display i))
    (newline) )
(for (i 1 100) (fizzbuzz i))

Totally different structure from the usual loop-if-else repetition and hardcoding of everything, because Scheme encourages coding in small pieces. Of course I wrote my own for macro which expands to a named let loop; there's many like it but this one is mine. More Motie engineering.

A Scheme of Gerbils Runnin' in a Wheel

Chicken's mediocre performance is causing me problems, so I'm taking yet another language tour/spike.

Looking at Gerbil Scheme, as a faster Scheme and as a bonus it's closer to R7RS. It has far less library support than Chicken, but does have a FFI, and compiles to a native binary through C, so I really don't need too many libraries.

Instead of the #!key #!optional #!rest keywords used in Chicken and some others, Gerbil uses a literal template style for functions:

;; Chicken: (define (foo a #!key (b 'bar) #!optional (c "see?") #!rest rest)
;; Gerbil:
(def (foo a b: (b 'bar) (c "see?") . rest)
    (print "a=" a " b=" b " c=" c " rest=" rest "\n")
)
(foo "Mark" 1 b: "bees!" 'what) ;; note out-of-order optional & keyword
;; a=Mark b=bees! c=1 rest=what

I like this style better, but I dislike the "def" keyword (which uses the enhanced lambda that does this) instead of "define" which uses "lambda%" (traditional lambda).

Gerbil uses [] for list construction, and {} for method dispatch, so goodbye to the nicely distinguishable braces I was using in Chicken. The spec says implementations can do what they want with those symbols, but I wish they wouldn't. Ah, well. I'll add a shitload more whitespace and some comments and it'll be fine.

The struct/object system in Gerbil is pretty nice, they're slightly upgraded records, but there's an (@ obj field) syntax instead of (MyClass-field obj), and (defmethod {mymethod MyClass} ...) creates a polymorphic {mymethod obj args} which finds the right method for any object, which is especially useful for inheritance.

I tried doing some VT100 graphics just to proof-of-concept, but it's doing something to the terminal, such that the same escape codes which work in Python don't clear the screen fully in Gerbil. After a short losing battle with stty and termcap, I give up on that and I'll jump right to writing a C FFI to SDL, because in 2019 that's easier than writing to a console.

Daily reminder that everything we have made since 1984 is overcomplicated junk. On an Atari 800, this took a few seconds to type, and you could start coding a nice UI instantly:

atari-is-awesome-graphics1

Alas, we live in a fallen world, so this is going to be trouble. Here's my Gerbil FFI template so far:

package: myffi

(import
    :std/foreign
)

(export #t)

(begin-ffi
    ;; names of all Scheme wrappers to expose
    (chello)

(c-declare #<<CDECLEND

#include <stdio.h>

int chello(void) {
    printf("Hello this is C!\n");
    return 1;
}

CDECLEND
)

    (define-c-lambda chello () int "chello")

) ;; begin-ffi


; TODO for constants: (define FOO ((c-lambda () int "___result = FOO;")))

(define (main . args)
    (chello)
)

Gerbil has a Scheme-based build system, but I'm a caveman so I make another build.zsh:

#!/bin/zsh

function usage {
    echo "Usage: build.zsh MAIN.scm [LIBS] || -?"
    exit 1
}

if [[ $# -eq 0 || "$1" == "-?" || "$1" == "--help" ]]; then
    usage
fi

mkdir -p bin

main=`basename $1 .scm`

gxc -exe -static -O -o bin/$main "$@" || exit 1
echo "Built bin/$main"

Now:

% ./build.zsh myffi.scm
Built bin/myffi
% bin/myffi
Hello this is C!

Hooray! Unconditional success! Only took all afternoon and a half-pot of coffee!

Now I "merely" have to wrap all of SDL (well, just the parts I need) and get linking working and oh sweet merciless Cthulhu. And I still won't know how much this'll help my performance until I'm days into it. But, the first step is the hardest.

Tower of Babble

Programmers almost compulsively make new languages; within just a few years of there being computers, multiple competing languages appeared:

It proliferated from there into millions; probably half of all programmers with 10+ years of experience have written one or more.

I've written several, as scripting systems or toys. I really liked my Minimal script in Hephaestus 1.0, which was like BASIC+LISP, but implemented as it was in Java the performance was shitty and I had better options to replace it. My XML game schemas in GameScroll and Aiee! were half programmer humor, but very usable if you had a good XML editor. Multiple apps have shipped with my tiny lisp interpreter Aspic, despite the fruit company's ban on such things at the time. A Brainfuck/FORTH-like Stream, working-but-incomplete tbasic, and a couple PILOT variants (I think PILOT is hilariously on the border of "almost useful").

Almost every new language is invented as marketing bullshit based on a few Ur-languages:

  • C++: Swift
  • Java: Javascript (sorta), C#, Go
  • Awk: Perl, Python, PHP, Julia
  • C: Rust
  • Smalltalk: Objective-C
  • Prolog: Erlang, Elixir
  • ALGOL: C, Pascal, PL/1, Simula, Smalltalk, Java
  • LISP: Scheme, ML, Haskell, Clojure, Racket
  • BASIC: None, other than more dialects of BASIC.
  • FORTRAN: None in decades, but is the direct ancestor of ALGOL & BASIC.
  • COBOL: None in decades.

A few of these improve on their ancestors in some useful way, often performance is better, but most do nothing new; it's plausible that ALGOL 68 is a better language than any of its descendants, it just has mediocre compiler support these days.

Certainly I've made it clear I think Swift is a major regression, less capable, stable, fast, or even readable than C++, a feat I would've called impossible except as a practical joke a decade ago. When Marzipan comes out, I'll be able to rebuild all my 15 years of Objective-C code and it'll work on 2 platforms. The Swift 1.0 app I wrote and painfully ported to 2.0 is dead as a doornail, and current Swift apps will be uncompilable in 1-2 years; and be lost when Apple abandons Swift.

When I want to move my Scheme code to a new version or any other Scheme, it's pretty simple, I made only a handful of changes other than library importing from MIT Scheme to Chez to Chicken 4 to Chicken 5. When I tested it in Racket (which I won't be using) I had to make a handful of aliases. Probably even CLISP (which is the Swift of LISPs, except it fossilized in 1994) would be 20 or 30 aliases; their broken do iterator would be hard but the rest is just naming.

Javascript is a pernicious Herpes-virus-like infection of browsers and desktops, and nothing can ever kill it, so where it fits the problem, there's no reason not to use it. But there's a lot it doesn't do well.

I was leery of using FreePascal because it has a single implementation (technically Delphi still exists, but it's $X,000 per seat on Windows) and minimal libraries, and in fact when it broke on OS X Mojave, I was disappointed but I-told-you-so.

I'm not saying we should quit making new Brainfuck and LOLCODE things, I don't think it's possible for programmers to stop without radical brain surgery. But when you're evaluating a language for a real-world problem, try moving backwards until you find the oldest and most stable thing that works and will continue to work, not piling more crap into a rickety new framework.

The Biblical reference in the title amuses me, because we know now that it requires no malevolent genocidal war deity scared of us invading Heaven to magically confuse our languages and make us work at cross purposes; anyone who can write and think splinters their thought into a unique language and then argues about it.