May 8th, 2020 Progress is Slow, May 2020 Update By Jeffrey M. Barber

“Wow”

I forgot how much work there is in building a programming language, but it is super fun. So here we are in May of the remarkably interesting 2020. I am coming out a slump of depression (I think) from this world-changing covid-19, and I recently made good progress towards the first milestone.

I am lurching forward ever so slowly every weekend I invest in this madness.

The first milestone is, fundamentally, a real game. Afterall, if this thing cannot ship real online board games, then it is a failure. The good news is that I am testing a real game, filling in missing rules, adding content, fixing bugs, re-reading the rule book, and working on the UI. I do not expect much from the UI for a game I do not intend to release (friends only due to licensing issues). The key thing is that I am suffering my language while I make progress on a product rather than being stuck in the infinite meta-game of improving the language.

It is a remarkable feeling to have over 3,000 lines of code in my own language.

This first milestone will be a success when I play a few games with people I know, and I am getting closer to this every weekend. The real question is what happens after this milestone, and this is where I need to find a good balance between playing the product-game (i.e. shipping real games) versus the build-the-empire (i.e. the meta-game of developing the programming language). What is a successful strategy?

This is something to think about during May, but one thing on my mind is that I must have a ruthless focus on shipping games rather than focusing on meta-problems. “Write Games, Not Engines” is particularly good advice. I am finding that I’ve solved a sufficiently hard problem with my language to justify its existence because I’m using the language to do exceptionally complex things, but I must resist the siren’s call to improve the language because that is an never-ending task.

So, my current premature attempt at a strategy is:

  1. Fix bugs in the language which are show-stoppers.
  2. Ship a game
  3. Do a retrospective after shipping a game, write about what was good versus what was awkward.
  4. Pick exactly 3 issues to improve within the language, and do them
  5. Goto 2