Four short links: 23 December 2019
Choose Your Own Adventure, Crystal OS, Chinese Tone Language, and RIP Chuck Peddle
- The Hidden Structures of “Choose Your Own Adventure” Books (Verge) — maps of the books reveal/illustrate the differences between the books.
- lilith — POSIX-like x86-64 kernel and userspace written in Crystal. The Crystal language is statically typed with compile-time checks for null references, a concurrency model, C bindings, and Ruby-like syntax. This is the first UI I’ve seen in it.
- Wenyan — an esoteric programming language that closely follows the grammar and tone of classical Chinese literature. Useless and incomprehensible to me, but a notable experiment. I see plenty of Chinese-language projects on GitHub now, often trending, and I feel like English’s position as the tech de facto lingua franca can no longer be presumed for the next decade.
- In Memoriam of Chuck Peddle — he created the 6502, the chip inside the C64, Apple II, Atari 2600, NES, BBC Micro, and other home computers that are where my generation coded, hacked, and BBSed. The book The Story of Commodore, A Company on the Edge gave me huge respect for his work. (via Slashdot)