senders.io - Blog

Lisps, Assembly, C, and Conlangs

I had originally hoped to do more blogging as a way of practicing my + writing and an incentive to do more hobby programming. The intent was + never to make this site solely programming, I had actually a few scrapped + posts about baking and guitar that just didn't get anywhere... but + that being said I did have a fair amount of hobbying in 2019 that I can + share some unfiltered, semi-structured thoughts on.

Racket, 80x86, and even more C

Racket

Racket is a + general-purpose lisp-like language. I had began messing around in it with + the intention of creating a similar language to Scribble a document + authoring language written in Racket. I made the classic mistake of trying to create a + productivity tool rather than just do the task I had originally intended + to do. It was interesting messing around in a lisp/functional language + which I haven't really used in a long time. I wish I had more + insightful things to say about it or project to share. Either way its + very worth the look.

6502 -> 80x86 -> Commander X16

I wanted to play around with writing some assembly language programs. + I looked back at the NES tutorials and tried writing some basic + hello-world programs for it, but never really came out with anything + worth while. I booted up dosbox and tried experimenting in some DOS + programming to get a kick of nostalgia. On my way over to a friends + apartment I stumbled across an 80x86 reference book which I took home and + dug into. I made some decent progress in, relative to my 6502 learning. + But this was in the summer, and I was preparing for what would turn into + a pretty time consuming move. After my move, my puppy, and some youtube, + The 8-Bit Guy + made a video about his 8 Bit computer project Commander X16 which I + started looking into. Like all the other assembly language projects they + never amounted to more than a few print statements or colors on the + screen. But X16 is something I am going to keep an eye on in 2020.
+ Ben Eater also started a + 6502 video series + which was amazing, and thankfully my learnings from earlier in the year + made the content very understandable. In summary, I spent a lot of 2019 + reading and watching a lot of content about assembly language + programming, but never really did anything with it.

Never ending C

Without much to really say on the topic, I kept writing small programs + in C throughout the year. I spent a lot of time debugging and + troubleshooting a prefix terminal calculator with the intention of + making it a full utility to use on the command line / from within + scripts. You could do simple math without opening up x-calc, which I find + myself doing to check some quick math. Example code: calc "+ 1 1". To me this was far cleaner than + writing: echo $((1+1)). The big ideas I had + for it was adding a REPL and making it a command line calculator tool + where you could get the features of a standard calculator with store and + recall functions. This project involved making two stacks: the operations + and the numbers. Implementing two stacks from scratch was interesting and + I may upload the source and link it in an update. Overall it was full of + breaks, bugs, wrong turns, and bizarre memory issues. So needless to say + it was a fun 3 days of programming.

Non Programming Writing

The project that soaked up a majority of my writing time, which sadly + should've been documented here, was my conlang / world-building + project "Tyur". This project spawned out of sci-fi story ideas + that, of course, never went anywhere (due to my poor dialog writing, and + writing in general) and my interest in language history. I have been + reading + The Horse the Wheel and Language by David W. Anthony, which goes into + the history around Proto-Indo-European. It can be a bit dense so I had + been reading it on and off, and during the off times also started + The + Origins of Language: A Slim Guide by James R. Hurford, which tries to + provide insights on the evolutionary concept of language. Both of these + provided some fodder for the idea of creating my own conlang. My + conlang is "Tyur" the language spoken by the Tyur people. This + process has really been a mix of world-building around the Tyur and some + fun fantasy mini story ideas similar to The Lord of the Rings and old + Warhammer Fantasy worlds. This however began my adventure down the rabbit + hole of trying to figure out how to create a font so I can write more + here about it. The documentation on this conlang is a mix of loose-leaf + folded in my bag that I scribble on when I get an idea. So figuring out a + proper way of building the alphabet and some root words to start a + dictionary are my current goals for the remainder of the year/ start of + 2020.

Closing

In closing, I think despite not writing much here, I messed around + with some interesting languages this year, and hope I can hobby more in + 2020.