I’ve been working with Clojure professionally for four years now, and I made some posts about the language in the past. Clojure is a great language, although not without its fair share of things to consider. In other words, I don’t see Clojure as an ideal language by any means, and it’s not suitable for every type of project.
Categories / programming
The unexpected part!
I liked hacking on Lox in Zig a lot, so I decided it would be great to make some changes to the language. It should be good for a better understanding of the book’s material, and probably will be a lot of fun!
This is a second post about the Crafting Interpreters book by Robert Nystrom.
In the first post, I’ve described my experience with the first half of the book, and the challenges of using a different language with different idioms and practices. This post will be no different, although I have a bit more to discuss, and the contents aren’t actually ~2-year-old weak impressions and remembrances.
I decided to give Janet another look - I’ve mentioned Janet before in this blog, and I have my thoughts on it. However, I have never actually interacted with the language that much - I only read its documentation and some code.
Today I would like to discuss the Crafting Interpreters book by Robert Nystrom.
It’s a book about designing an interpreter for a dynamic programming language called Lox. Well, not exactly. It’s split into two parts - in the first is about crafting a tree-walking interpreter, and the second is about writing a complete bytecode VM.
In the previous post on the subject I’ve described how one can create a custom compilation mode for any language. In the Dynamically extracting filenames from compiler output section I’m talking about various issues with how Clojure reports problem locations. The main problem is when the problem is inside of a dependency, and be it your own library, or a third-party one it’s equally tedious to go and look into it because the dependency usually is a jar file somewhere in the ~/.
Early on in my career, when I saw a function that returns an anonymous function, I felt a weird mix of emotions. It was just a weird thing to do, especially when you’re coming from C, where there are no anonymous functions. Such concepts as lambdas in C++ were hard to grasp, and I’m thankful that instead of continuing to hit my head against the C++ wall I picked Scheme, and it helped me understand many core concepts, such as higher-order functions that we’ll be mainly talking about in this post.
I’m pleased to announce that most of my libraries for fennel are now shipped as single files! It was a long-standing issue with Fennel for me, as there was no clear way to ship both macros and functions in the same file, but after some experimentation, I figured out a way.
Lately, I’ve been working on async.fnl in my spare time and realized that the previous code that I used to schedule timers was terrible. Well, realized isn’t an appropriate word here, because I knew it back when I first implemented it, I just didn’t bother to make it better until I had a fully working library.
Well, this was fun! A bit exhausting, actually. The first of five months of the challenge has ended and here are the results:
Play Game1 on itch.io The game isn’t really complete, but I did my best to make it feel as complete as possible in the time constraints I had.