Comment by jedimastert

5 years ago

Aside from "rewrite in rust" debate that I was unaware of, there seems to be this pervasive attitude among the HN hivemind that the end-goal for all projects, side- or main-, is "launch", and therefore needs a market analysis to decide the "worth" of such an idea, and it ends up being rather silly.

For example, I've written a Mandelbrot visualizer so many times I've lost count. Not because the world needs another poorly written or optimized rainbow-ladybug-simulator, but because it serves as a slightly-non-trivial hello-world. For example, it's the first end-to-end thing I made in Common Lisp. https://git.sr.ht/~amtunlimited/mandelbrot-plot

4 comments

jedimastert

pjmlp 5 years ago

I have a A* search algorithm and a toy compiler that I use exactly for the same purpose.

I just rewrite them all the time as means to get a feeling about programming languages.

I dumped a couple of other stuff on GitHub so that HR people are happy to get a link that they never read anyway.

Then I get back to Java and .NET at the office. :)

jedimastert 5 years ago
I've actually been considering adding a toy compiler to my collection of getting-up-to-speed projects, do you mind sharing what you think are good features?
- pjmlp 5 years ago
  
  Try to follow along the Tiger Book, in the variant that appeals to you.
  https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/
  It covers most areas quite alright even if a bit aged.
- spoiler 5 years ago
  
  Not OP, but there's also "crafting interpreters". In the second half of the book you emit bytecode for whatever language you designed in the first half, and also implement a VM for said bytecode.