Almost done with 2021
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I took today off from all my main work and
instead have been working on an odd little side
project: writing a translator that can take a
Scratch program and compile it to other
languages that are less, shall we say,
idiosyncratic in their style.

Okay, so for those who don't know Scratch is a
blocks-based (so in other words you fit
statements together like little puzzle pieces
and put expressions into holes inside the
statements or other expressions) language that's
used to teach children how to code. If you know
Smalltalk, Squeak, Pharo, &c. it's basically a
kind of (somewhat oddly) simplified version of
Squeak that only allows message passing as a
broadcast to all objects and doesn't allow much
in the way of introspection on objects. From a
PL theory perspective it's kind of an odd duck.

Now the point of this project is that this is
something that could be really useful as
a tool for other people who are trying to help
youth transition from Scratch to other, not
agent-based, languages. If I can write a few
different backends that allow compilation to,
say, python+pygame or javascript+p5js, or things
like that it could be a really neat little tool
where you can work on code in Scratch where you
knew what you're doing and then translate it
into a different language as a kind of
personally generated cheat-sheet as you're
trying to learn the new language.

Other than that I've been trying to do bits of
writing here and there, I went on a walk for the
first time in a couple of days because the
sidewalks were finally no longer so icy my worn
through boots would betray me. I picked up a
couple of very nice bags of coffee instead of
the cheap stuff from Trader Joe's I rely on.

For those who don't know I tend to drink three
or four biiiig cups of coffee a day. I don't
think I generally have less than 1g of caffeine
in a day. I'm very neurotypical.

Right now I'm drinking some mostly but not
entirely decaf coffee since the night is cold
and the world is quiet.