Author Archives: seanw

Blink

You blink, and six months go by. That’s what having kids is like, apparently. I could swear we were just gearing up for Thanksgiving, and now it’s spring and the daffodils are springing up. I just realized how long it’s been since I’ve even seen some of my closest friends. I used to joke about asking “What year is it?” And now, well, that question is starting to seem more legitimate every day.

But haven’t got a lot of news, really. Lots of time spent at work, and a business trip to California. Saw my sister and brother-in-law out there, and their little girl. Worked on the house a bit during the cold months: We have a proper ladder to the garage attic now, and the garage is not exactly clean but cleaner than it used to be. Spent some of the time going to doctors for my injured foot. And Alan’s growing fast; he’s at nearly 18 months now and running around like a lunatic. Kid’s cute as a button, and my wife and I couldn’t be more pleased.

Got a little bit of work done on SpaceMonger’s scanner, but nothing really notable. I’d like to get the core scanner 64-bit compatible and change how it shares data between threads; that’ll improve both performance and stability, and early experiments with it have been promising, but again, time just slips away from me.

Smile

I’ve made a handful of commits to the Smile interpreter. It consumes a lot of my driving-to-work and standing-in-the-shower brain cells. The interpreter is slow as heck (s’what I get for writing it in C#), but the performance can be fixed over time (or a better interpreter can be written). More importantly, it works, and is really quite unlike any programming language I’ve ever used, and I’ve used quite a lot of them. Smile reads simply, a little like a mash between BASIC and JavaScript and Ruby, but it’s actually Lisp and Smalltalk under the hood: Stupid-crazy powerful. I can do things in one line of code in it that would have required large whole programs in C. I don’t have macros or continuations yet (and you have no idea how much I want both of those), but I still can’t get over the fact that it works. This bizarre idea I had fifteen years ago that you could add an object-oriented syntax translation layer on top of Lisp to de-Lisp-ify it actually works, and not only looks good but feels good.

I own smile-lang.org, and I’ve been thinking about possibly publishing the interpreter there for download. I have some (hidden) documentation there right now. I want the interpreter to be open-source — I’ll probably host it on Github, and the source is under an Apache license — but I’m still nervous about sharing a work-in-progress. Things still change in it as I work on it, and as we found the other day, some programs from last year wouldn’t work under the latest interpreter. Many would, but a few were quite busted.

It’s a tough question for me: Share it, and let people complain that stuff is incomplete and some stuff doesn’t work; or keep it private until it’s more polished?

So I’m opening up comments on this posting, because after a year of working on Smile, I really can’t decide about sharing it. If you have a thought over the next month or so, feel free to write a comment, as long as it’s constructive. If the crowd leans toward sharing, I’ll do that; and if not, well, I’ll keep muddling along as I have been until the code’s pretty solid in, say, 2017.

Anyway, that’s that. It’s late, and I’m tired. And yes, 9:30 PM is apparently now late. You see what having kids does to you?

Alan

My son turns one year old tomorrow. Boggles the mind. Feels like he was born yesterday, or last week or something. This should explain pretty well where I’ve been lately. He’s a cute kid, and incredibly photogenic and well-behaved. My wife and I are really lucky.

But, yes, he’s turning one, and my wife wishes he was still a cuddly tiny ball of joy, and instead he’s now a giggling toddler. This weekend, we’ll have everybody and their brother’s uncle’s cousin’s nephew’s former roommate dropping by for his birthday party. Gifts have already started filling the hall, and I’m getting this weird feeling that I don’t own the house anymore, even though my name’s on the mortgage. The place is gonna be a madhouse, but the kidlet’s gonna have an incredible first birthday party.

SpaceMonger

Sales of SpaceMonger 3 are continuing nicely, courtesy of my friends at EdgeRunner. It’s really nice to be able to sit back and think about the algorithms instead of the business model. Some time between SM 3.0 and whatever the next really major version is (3.5? 4.0? I’ll leave that to EdgeRunner’s branding gurus), I’d really like to rebuild SM’s scanner from the ground up. The original design was decent, but I’ve had a better model in my head for years that would make its already-quick scanning even faster. The new design uses crazy stuff like lock-free queues, and functors as messages, and sector-ordered scanning to avoid head seeks, and would be awesome, and that would open up a lot of interesting possibilities for the future for things like persistent scans and automatic background scans — if I could find the time to code all that.

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Well, that was a quick month.

So what’s happened? I’m a married father with a baby, so family eats up a lot of time. And there’s that full-time employment thing I do most of the week. And a secret project I can’t tell you much about but that you’re gonna love (psst, that link’s not a link yet :-P). And yard work, and chores around the house; with spring comes mowing and mulch and weeds. We also had our basement flood when the big rainstorm came through last week, and pumping out that water and cleaning up afterwards was just loads of fun.

But you probably don’t care about all that; what most of you in reader-land care about is Smile, this suddenly-notorious little programming language I’ve spent so much of the last decade-plus thinking about and working on. So let’s talk about that.

I’ve been busily shoring up the implementation of the interpreter, trying to knock out bugs and fix issues, getting it to the point where it at least parses and executes the whole language correctly, and is a full implementation of both the core language and the base-level libraries. I’ve also been writing documentation, lots and lots of documentation, so that when you do get your hands on a copy of it, you won’t just throw your hands up in disgust and confusion, and you’ll be able to learn it and try demos and look up answers when you don’t understand things. This has been a lot of work, to put it mildly, and there’s a lot more to go.

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