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.