Gosh … we’re half way through the year already.
So what am I up to in programming?
Clojure
I still think it’s a wonderful language. Not doing as much as I’d like. But it’s still great.
One thing I did a few months ago was port the terminal version of Mind Traffic Control to it. Which you can get here : https://gitlab.com/interstar/MTC-CLJ
And I’m happy with it. Works fine. I’m using it every day.
That means that my experimenting with Racket is unfortunately at an end. I don’t currently see myself going back to using Racket for anything in the near future. Nice as it is, I think I’m committing to Clojure for my Lispish stuff at the moment.
C++
Huh? Yep. I’ve been doing audio programming recently. And, unfortunately, until https://github.com/soul-lang/SOUL goes mainstream, there doesn’t seem to be much alternative.
In particular I’m playing with plugin development for VCVRack, which is surprisingly civilized. And yeah, in that specific context, with their nice API and nanovg it’s all fairly OK.
Which makes me also want to try another go at VST programming with JUCE. (I’m doing a lot of music in FL Studio these days, too). And I’m doing something on Android with Oboe.
Oboe is OK, but Android is hell!
Flutter / Dart
Which brings me to Dart / Flutter which I started playing with today. And already, I’m sold. I never bothered to look at Dart before. It looked like the kind of “bit nicer than Java” language which is probably good to have, but has never got my pulse racing.
But Flutter … literally I’ve wanted to do stuff on Android for ages. And HATED every time I’ve tried to do much with it. The whole experience is ghastly.
But finally … Flutter actually looks like some sanity has been brought to Android. Yey! It’s all in one file. Yey! A language that allows complex data declaration and therefore can use this to define reactive UIs declaratively. Yey! Hot-reload (like Figwheel for ClojureScript).
Finally. Some sanity.
OK, this might be premature. I haven’t actually done anything more than the hello world tutorial. But it does look like it’s an acceptable Android programming language / framework.
Next challenge, can I call native C++ libraries like Oboe from it?
Ferret
I still think Ferret (a compile to C++ Clojure-like) looks promising. And I asked the inventor if I can make libraries for inclusion into C++ code with it.
Great. So once I’ve got a moment to play, I’ll see if I can write some pure data-model / code stuff in Ferret, compile it to C++ and try to use in a) my music context and b) natively on Android.
Python3
I’m in the process of moving my code-bases to Python3.
I think TSWiki code (and the libraries) are pretty much done. FSQuery theoretically but I found a bug. I think OWL is getting there but not released.
Basically I am on schedule that all my non legacy / abandoned Python is going to be Python3 by the end of this year.
Prolog
I’m still fascinated by the potential of Prolog or Prolog-like declarative / logic / inference-engine enabled languages.
And I’m actually playing a bit with SWI-Prolog at the moment. It is VERY GOOD.
Running a web-server and putting a web front-end to Prolog turns out to be fairly straightforward and very concise. Actually generating HTML from the DCG-based DSL is also surprisingly good. More or less equivalent to my own Python library for this
If I can just figure out how to do some of the things I’m now imagining Prolog is good for (see my last post) in Prolog, then I might well be doing some fun stuff here.
So yeah, that’s me, August 2019 : Clojure, Python3, Dart / Flutter, C++, Prolog
And I’m finally getting my development environment into Docker containers.
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