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Comment to change my life

I have more ideas than I know what to do with; sadly, this is not because I'm busy, but more that I lack motivation to make time for my own ideas. This is particularly frustrating for programming projects: I enjoy programming for the sake of it, I really want some things to exist, and I'm ok if I'm the only one who ever uses the program... yet usually I can muster at most 10 hours of enthusiasm for any particular project, of which at least half is spent over-thinking (and under-delivering).

So, I thought I'd ask the internet what it thought of some of my programming thought bubbles where I've actually got to the point of writing some code. Tell me something sounds boring, or tell me something sounds great. A single comment either way may inspire me to do something, if only through orneriness. And though I've provided links, they're not likely to be useful. Not one of these is MVP-worthy.

  1. PythonRepl is the result of hacking on Skulpt to give it some more Logo like characteristics (e.g. optional parens, repeat construct) and making a REPL with an inline built-in editor. Initial work is here. Further ideas include adding more 'visual' clues to the REPL (e.g. show defined variables/values on the RHS), debugging/tracing, and integrating 'choose your own adventure' style learning materials. Potentially some based on Turtle Geometry. I'm keen on doing this partly to work through some of my frustrations with my current job (I work on a computing education learning platform), and partly because I'd like to use it to teach my kids stuff.
  2. jossy is the start of a Typescript interpreter for JOSS; my father worked on a JOSS system for IBM in the 60s, and I have a bunch of old manuals about its implementation (which the internet doesn't seem to know much about). JOSS is a fairly disturbing looking language by modern standards, but I at least would be amused by a pseudo-shared JOSS system accessible via a web-browser.
  3. I've been intermittently messing with MGR to make it use SDL (suggested on that page, but it was my idea too, honest!). Even the internet confirms I've known about MGR for a while. I hacked it to a state of kinda working, but am now in the middle of a vaguely annoying refactor which breaks everything.
  4. Mik is the start of me trying to work through my frustrations using Makefiles for a tiny subset of what they're designed for: namely, you often just want a nice way to have a bunch of small bash scripts with dependencies between them to help do 'stuff' in a project, and don't care about the targets (or understanding Make variables vs bash variables, etc. etc.). This file might make it clearer where things are supposed to end up.
  5. Pif is an attempt at writing a ridiculous language just because I hadn't seen someone do it that way yet; it's a bit like Forth with typing, where the "stack" can only hold one thing of each type. And also because I've seen too many learners hung up on syntax errors, and I was trying to write something which was more likely to execute in all situations or at least give execution related errors rather than the interpreter/compiling just giving up.
  6. Journalship was me a few years ago chucking a tantrum after too many bruising encounters with fluentd, and dreaming that I could quickly write a log shipping framework that was trivial to deal with. Look, to be honest, I'd probably just use Vector now.

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