At the beginning of the month, I hit a wall. I have no more “saved-up” tic-tac-toe implementations, and it’s become pretty hard to contemplate taking a couple evenings a week away from my family to make new ones.
This is partly because what I’m doing with them has become less interesting, and thus motivating. The very nature of the exercise as I set it up, its pace, its limitations—a new implementation of an identical text-based game in a novel language, once a week—have been actually taking me away from the most interesting part, which is learning new ways of thinking. Several times I’ve found myself essentially porting another implementation and in the process stripping away all the novel features of the language. I wrote the Clojure post by modifying my scheme program. It’s somewhat interesting that this was straightforward to do, and I tried to make the best of it. But it felt bad, and I don’t think it was really all that enlightening to learn that you can implement the same simple program similarly in two LISP dialects.
The last one I feel I really did justice was Cobra, and that was the last one I really spent some time on.
I’ve also been avoiding or putting off languages without obvious parallels to things I already know. This is precisely contrary to the point. I downloaded Self the other day with the intent to use it for the week’s program, but found a) that it doesn’t seem to have a console interface at all, and b) that there’s no way to even write it outside its image-based environment and GUI. This clearly counts as novel and interesting, but there’s no way I’m ending up with a working program after 4 hours.
So, I’m pivoting. I’ll keep working through the list at a more measured pace, and with much more of a focus on producing end products that reflect the tool’s capabilities and intent. I’ll write GUI programs for Visual Basic and Objective C, for example. I’ll figure out some excuse to use goroutines in Go.
If you’ve been following along because the stunt seemed amusing, I’m sorry to disappoint. If it’s any consolation, I still plan to do brainf*ck and Piet. But as the man says, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
It would also help me immeasurably if I knew there were people actually reading this stuff. I don’t have stats on how many feed readers I have so some weeks it’s a bit like lecturing to an empty room. If you’re still reading but not commenting, would you let me know?
This sounds like a good idea to me. As a reader, I’m less interested in observing the herculean feat of a new implementation in new language each week, than I am in getting an up-close-and-personal look at languages that are unfamiliar to me. A slower pace and more time spent understanding how the language wants you to think will probably be more interesting to you and us.
Also, you might want to think of this not so much as a lecture hall, but an artist’s open studio. You’re just doing your work, and letting us watch you do it. Of course, if you’re going to make the effort to open the studio, you’d like people to come in, but promoting a blog is an art unto itself, and requires a level of extra effort you may not be interested in making. But you’re leaving a pretty interesting record here, one that will probably find readers even after you’ve completed your tour. I hope that’s enough incentive to keep making your work public, because I’m hooked.