Moon / Stubb
2019-01-04 1-:29pm

As I had talked about a little while back,  I have enjoyed coding
games for the Pico-8 platform. Pico-8 game development is done in
Lua. My wife and I named our cat Lua (partially due to the langu-
age and partly just because we like the name). It had been awhile
since I had used the language and  I had never used it for things
not related to game development. Solderpunk,  I believe,  wrote a
bit about Lua on their phlog and it got me thinking that it might
be fun to give it a try for something else.

Colorfield  Space  (my ssh server/gopher hosting)  did not have a
gopher browser.   I have built most of the applications in use on
the server and thought it would be fun to code a gopher client. I
had coded a graphical client in Python (with TK/TCL via TkInter).

I have had a blast over the last few days getting used to writing
the  language.  It is fun that it is a "batteries  not  included"
language.   Having to write things like string.split and the like
has been fun.  I got all of the core functionality working pretty
well now. It can load, save, edit, and delete bookmarks. It loads
gophertypes 0 and 1 only. It can save files to disk. It has navi-
gable history (forward and back) and refresh.

It is pretty basic, but seems to do the job pretty well. 

The browser is called "Stubb" after the 2nd mate of the Pequod. A
book  my wife insisted I read  and that I very much enjoyed,  the
beginning is a wonderful comedy,  the middle and end an enjoyable
adventure  (of a sort).  Some of the biological whale information
was not always the most thrilling (though some was really solid).
If you have yet to give it a try:  it  is  a  good  book  that  I
definitely recommend.

Similarly, I also recommend Lua! It has been small and fast with-
out a lot of fluff. The small standard library is really straigh-
tforward and easy to work with  (I cannot comment much on  the  C
api as my C skills are  not good enough to be able to make use of
it).

- - - - - - - 

While I have not been posting daily,  I am definitely reading all
of the updates in the circumlunarverse.   I continue to love this
community and have been enjoying the gopher content and the posts
on telem. One of these days I'll have to try out the IRC and XMPP
stuff. :)