Composability and Compositionality

The idea of composability, and perhaps separately "compositionality", is held in high regard by programming language people and systems analyst types. There are two related ideas here: You can build stuff out of other stuff. The whole can be decomposed into parts; multiple parts can be combined into something that is "like" the parts themselves, …

(Draft) Working blind, naming things

(I'm posting this because I wrote it. It's not finished by any means, and it doesn't logically flow in all areas.) I start from some environment (crudely put, the browser and its JS console) and I seek to create a new environment that is at least as good. The essential feature of this new environment …

Canvas: the assembly language of Web graphics

Now that I have a way to persist my JS console development, it's time to get to basic graphics as soon as possible. Something I must keep in mind here: I should be able to get away with horrible, hack-ish solutions in the short-term, because the whole point is that I should be able to …

1. Basic persistence

Using what I've learned from the quines investigation, and after several failed attempts, I've finally hit on a solution for persistence of the JS console session. Here is a sample session, recorded automatically and exported via the function defined near the end of the session: I began by typing in the initial assignment to setup. …

Writing quines (in text)

My first attempt to build some sort of persistence into interactive JavaScript development ended up hampered by needing a quine. Because this is an interesting problem that I've been putting off for ages, I'd like to attack it now. Okay, so after reading a bit, I sort of get the principles behind writing quines. I'll …

0. First steps. A wild quine appears!

Necessity 0: Substrate IN THE BEGINNING...there is a New Tab, and the JavaScript console. If I spend a while writing a big JavaScript file, and then write a skeleton HTML page, and link the two together, then I can load the page and see the results of the script. Not gonna do that though. I …

The road to BootstrapLab

Initially, the only starting platform that has the best combination of ease-of-deployment, ease-of-sharing, interactivity, reflection, and graphics + interaction programming, is the browser with its built-in JavaScript console. That is where this begins.* Make it so that a world can be built up interactively in the console, but then persisted and restored at a later time. …

Self-commentary: MemScribble

Following on from previously. Idea: All power to the user! As regards to their self-determination on an interactive computing device. Let them scribble over memory, explore memory, and execute machine instructions, interactively! CPU and memory are what it all boils down to. To get anything done, need a way to set the instruction pointer, and …

Introducing drw: a “useful tool” to solve a “practical problem”.

(I have gripes that I need to get out of my system. I think that documenting my approach to a coding task could demonstrate some points I want to make, and help me give some ideas solid grounding.) Motivation Existing solutions for drawing graphics suffer from numerous technical, performance and usability flaws. (probably—I didn't bother …

Self-commentary: low-level flailing in the dark

Following on from previously. Here's the story I have in mind. My environment starts, it's blank. I press F3 to enter Fallback mode. An overlaid prompt appears; at the very beginning of this universe, all I can do is enter code text. I type something like view clearColor <- Color red:255 green:0 blue:255, the background …