Has it been three years?
007, the toy language, is turning three today. Whoa.
On its one-year anniversary, I wrote a blog post to chronicle it. It seriously doesn't feel like two years since I wrote that post.
On and off, in between long stretches of just being a parent, I come back to 007 and work intensely on it. I can't remember ever keeping a side project alive for three years before. (Later note: Referring to the language here, not my son.) So there is that.
So in a weird way, even though the language is not as far along as I would expect it to be after three years, I'm also positively surprised that it still exists and is active after three years!
In the previous blog post, I proudly announce that "We're gearing up to an (internal) v1.0.0 release". Well, we're still gearing up for v1.0.0, and we are closer to it. The details are in the roadmap, which has become much more detailed since then.
Noteworthy things that happened in these past two years:
- I've gone full circle, trying a very difficult thing first with strategy A, then with B, and now with A again.
- I've had to invent a new term, "injectile", for the bit of code a macro produces; often a copy of a quasi block.
- An issue about quasi unquotes has stalled because parsing is hard enough without differently-shaped holes, and was hijacked by very interesting discussions about syntax and whether "quasi" is a fitting name for the thing it signifies.
- I've understood new things about templates.
Things that I'm looking forward to right now:
- Landing
macro infix:<ff>
inmaster
, which is quite literally one small fix away at this point. - Landing a huge object system refactor that really cleans up the language.
is parsed
, also only a few steps away.- Making a better web site, focused around language tutorials and API documentation.
- Writing a 007 parser in pure 007.
I tried to write those in increasing order of difficulty.
All in all, I'm quite eager to one day burst into #perl6
or #perl6-dev
and actually showcase examples where macros quite clearly do useful, non-trivial things. 007 is and has always been about producing such examples, and making them run in a real (if toy) environment.
And while we're not quite over that hump yet, we're perceptibly closer than we were two years ago.
Belated addendum: Thanks and hugs to sergot++, to vendethiel++, to raiph++ and eritain++, for sharing the journey with me so far.