Yak shaving post from lobste.rs
One day, I read a book called Daemon (by Daniel Suarez). Its year 2010 and I begin to think about the infrastructure and architecture of the Daemon.
I like personal wiki software, and I am trying to reconcile something like three to five places where I write my notes into one place in computer shared across all devices I own at that time. I have this beautiful idea; lets make decentralized infrastructure that will allow you to work with structured data. It should also be a personal wiki. Tool which you can use to write your personal notes, use it to generate your homepage, but also to interact with all feeds you use and generate (everything from jabber, irc to last.fm feed and catalog of your movie ratings on imdb), index them and work with them with all of your programs. Websites? Pfffff. Just write an API for them and mirror them in this tool, so you can build custom views on the comment streams and whatnot! It will be glorious.
So I start to learn Rebol, because it seems to be really ideal for this kind of tool. I read everything there is about Rebol. I don’t mean it figuratively, but literally. I’ve read all books, all articles I could find and most of the discussions in systematic manner during a period of year or two. Then I decide that whole tooling is kinda immature and strange and broken and forgotten. But I learn that Rebol is like a lisp with different syntax. Hmm, lisp you say?
So I learn lisp. I even write my own interpreter in D language. I really like metacircular evaluators and macros and all kind of strange stuff you can get with lisp. I read about Genera and other live environments, which leads me to Smalltalk.
Smalltalk! This seems fine. And I really like the environment. So I order a bunch of books about Smalltalk and start using Pharo. But after a year or so, I realize that class based programming is really not the best solution for my problem.
In 2015/9, I find Self. So I order a PDF manual printed on demand, and I find that it contains a lot of bugs. So I fix them, and order it again. It still contains a lot of bugs, so I fix them again and order another copy. Bonus: I now know Self, because I’ve read a handbook three times in a row. I have a whole personal wiki dedicated to just Self, what I don’t like, what I do, tips and tricks. I read almost all the papers about Self, and all articles (I have a page in wiki just dedicated to articles and I read them one by one), and then whole mail conference.
When I try to write my first programs, I find out that Self is really broken. Unicode doesn’t work, environment is fragile and it is written in C++. I don’t like C++. How hard it would be to rewrite it from scratch? I really don’t want to do that, but how hard would it be to just implement frontend layer and use some existing backend virtual machine, like JVM, or Lua?
One day I read about rpython. So I naturally try to write Self parser in it. And then AST representation. And then compiler. And VM. And suddenly, I am really doing my own reimplementation. And I am writing articles about Self, and about writing your own language, and having this strange conversations with people about structured operating systems and nature of the true object orientation and religious flame wars about languages and their object models.
Suddenly its 2019, my language almost works, and there is this publicly accessible course about GraalVM in the city where I live. So I take some time from work and go there, and the teacher really likes my articles about programming your own language and connects me with some people from Oracle, who worked on the original Self. Sadly, I have no time to push this towards something, because I am trying to bootstrap hybrid of the first version of my wiki in PyQT and tinySelf (thats how I call my little language).
Meanwhile, I still use CherryTree and also notion.so and my distributed wiki is still mostly idea and bunch concept images and pages and mindmaps, more than anything working. But I have dreams. Sometimes they are so vivid, that I am really mad that they are just dreams. And I also still have a lot of frustration from the technology around me.
So I keep working, and shaving the Yak. He doesn’t know it yet, but I am determined to shave him and collapse him back to depth 1. He is restless and kicks around itself and fights me, but I’ll keep shaving it, with the upmost rigor and determination. I will do so, until it is bald and naked. I will conquer all his yakiness, and use it for my own purposes, or die trying.
