Josh On Design

I'm happy to announce Filament 0.4. If the previous release was about new language features, this one is about apis and docs. A language isn't useful if you don't have APIs to do stuff with.

Fundamental Language Changes

I’ve been working a lot on new graphics apis, and new examples to exercise those apis. Things like turtle graphics, which are great for learning recursive functions, and image pixel processing, which are super fun and closer to Raytracing and GPU shaders than you might realize. However, along the way, I’ve discovered some missing features that have forced me to make some tough decisions. Today let’s talk about conditionals, jumps, and lambdas.

I'm happy to show you the next release of Filament, my humanist programming language designed for kids and scientists.

Filament is the humanist programming langauge I've been working on. Filament's focus is entirely on computational thinking and improving the way we use PLs, not on the implementation or performance. It is for thinking about problems, not producing software artifacts. It should be easy enough for children to use, but powerful enough for domain experts. Think of it as Mathematica for kids, scientists, and artists.

This is part of my series on the humanist programming language I’m building called (currently) HL. Read the rest here.

This is part of my series on the humanist programming language I’m building called (currently) HL. Read the rest here.

For years I’ve had this idea of a programming language (really a programming system) designed not for building software, but for exploring ideas. If built, it would be a system where you can easily access data both locally and remotely, process the data in many different ways, and use built in tools to visualize the answers. The current way we code just isn’t very amenable to exploring and thinking (outside of an Emacs Lisp buffer).

I’m happy to finally release a Javascript library I wrote at least four years ago. (I say ‘at least’ because the last commit was 4 years ago, but I don’t remember when or where I wrote the original code it came from). Presenting the parser from TallyCat!

If you havn't seen the news, 25% of Mozilla was laid off this week, including me, so I'm looking for a new job managing an engineering or developer relations team.

Every now and then I trumble around with building visual editors. Sometimes they are for vector graphics, sometimes raster. Sometimes for building GUIs, sometimes for editing JSON structures. These editors are almost always for fun and they never see the light of day. Why build a new editor when the world already has so many. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

At this point I’ve been working on the browser for over a month and I’ve learned a ton about Rust. Sadly, it’s time for me to stop. I’ve taken it about as far as I can.

Rendering. The big payoff. This is where we actually get to see something drawn to the screen. This is where the mini-browser starts to feel real. It’s also where the code is straight forward and the hard part is picking the library.

Now we get to the big dramatic part of building a browser. Layout. Until now we’ve just had a tree of data. This is the part where we position actual rectangles and colors and text blocks. The part where we do line wrapping and worry about font sizes. This is the real deal! Let’s dive in.

Styling in a browser is conceptually very simple. We’ve parsed the DOM into a tree structure of elements. We’ve parsed the CSS into a tree structure of rules.

I have greatly enjoyed the reliability of Rust so far, but a few things really annoy / mystify me. One is the type annotations. I understand that type annotations lets you say what type another type is defined in terms of. The common case is a vector of points, with something like:

I had hoped to be talking more about how to build a browser, but reality has intervened. It’s taken about a week, but the family is starting to calm down now and get used to the new normal of staying home. I’ve stocked up on supplies and prepped for exclusively working from home. Jesse is recovered from pink-eye and a cold, and we’ve scrubbed the house clean. Now all we can do is wait and try to help others as best we can.

In the last part I talked about my motivations for building a new web browser / rendering engine in Rust. Today I'll tackle how I parse HTML and CSS.

I have done something very foolish. I've started building a new web browser. From scratch. Not a new wrapper around Chromium or WebKit or Gecko. No, an actual new browser. Why have I done such a thing?!

In my side gig as a science fiction writer I'm trying to suss out the modern market. I grew up reading golden age sci-fi authors like Asimov and Heinlein. The are less than relevant today. When I was a kid YA (Young Adult) scifi/fantasy wasn't really a genre. Now it's dominated by modern blockbusters like Harry Potter and Divergent. So, if I'm to understand the modern market I should actually read some of this stuff. So that's why I read the first Hunger Games novel. Spoiler alert, I didn't like it but I do get it.

thoughts on build systems

I'm rebuilding my HTML Canvas Deep Dive book so I need a way to compile various source files into a final thing. I'm not producing an executable but rather a directory full of generated HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and possibly some other stuff; but it's the same basic idea. I need to turn a collection of things into another collection of things. I need a build system. So which should I use?