A while back I posted this spicily-phrased take:
I appreciate that someone else understands that being a GUI has some basic requirements and “draws to the screen” is not the interesting one. The bar is about 20cm off the floor but everyone forgets to jump.
Despite mostly not working on GUIs in my career, I have strong opinions about consistency and about affordances for beginners and power users alike. So today, let’s take a simple case study: a button.
SICPelago is a randomized Scheme environment where you unlock core capabilities by solving carefully selected exercises adapted from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Starting only with your trusty lambda and the supporting quote, climb your way to the top of the textbook, exploring math puzzles, composite data structures, and infinite sequences. Happy April Prototypes Day!
Last week a friend shared the existence of hlorenzi’s customasm, a tool that can serve as the assembler for arbitrary CPU architectures just by defining a mapping of instructions to encodings.
Hey, I made a CPU once! How hard would it be to make a customasm definition for ROSE-8? Turns out…not very! I played around with it for about two hours, and by the end of it I’d translated an entire ROSE-8 program to customasm, with most of the definition file looking basically the same as the text reference for the ISA encoding.