Boy, I have been busy! Unfortunately nothing related to Skila or NLT. I have “little” project going and I fell into a cycle of adding just the last feature and having five more ideas. Now I am at the point that I have tons of good ideas, the project looks really interesting and useful (educational area — I am not giving the address away yet, because I didn’t figure out the good name for it), I am enjoying it tremendously and I need server side language very badly.
PHP, Python, JS (with Node.JS), C# or maybe C++ — oh man, not those. I’ve been there — this one is not compiled, that one is cryptic, other closed but open-source. No, no, no. I can write programs in those languages for somebody else, but why hurt myself? Apple’s Swift could come to the rescue, but I don’t live in Apple ecosystem. Skila is supposed to be my solution but Skila is not ready.
Seriously, I am desperate. I am bored to death with limitations of nowadays languages, I want to enjoy writing code (after all it will take a lot of time, my leisure time).
And so I am evaluating another possibility — killing Skila! Yes, that’s correct. I am thinking that I made a mistake with the attitude to design — creating perfect language, with perfect features. That is exactly what is stopping me. Perfect is complex, perfect is hard, and I don’t have time for that. I need Skila for yesterday so my other project could grow.
I need imperfect language, simplified so I could cover at least server side of my project, and then client side. This is not awfully far for what I had in mind initially, but I drop performance from my goals. There is also a small advantage for me — I could make a compiler faster, design language faster and learn more from working language while implementing other projects than sitting forever and theoretically decide which feature or syntax is better.
Simplified Skila is the last chance for my own language — either I manage to pull this off and use it, or I won’t have any more time for language development, simply because I have other solid projects waiting for implementation, and however tempting is having nice language, it is not material for startup. All other projects are.
To end this post — some good readings, a blog OnStartups and few years old (I got to know about it a week ago) but still interesting reading about work culture in Netflix.
Skila 