App runtimes should support modifying apps.

Here's a 2-minute video on how that might look.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2021-11-14

permalink

Minor epiphany about Lua

a = {11, 12, 13, key=14, 15}

permalink

You knew this was coming. Conway's Game of Life in text mode using Unicode Braille glyphs.

git clone https://github.com/akkartik/teliva
cd teliva
make linux
src/teliva life.teliva

Sources: https://github.com/akkartik/teliva/blob/main/life.teliva

permalink

New project

https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

"An extremely naïve, brutalist attempt at packaging up simple Lua (5.1) apps with all the stuff needed to edit and build them."

---

Fun with the kids on a Saturday morning messing around with daddy's new program.

We gave each ring its own color, and we have it set up to move the towers randomly around after every move. Supremely silly.

permalink

Marceau, Fisler and Krishnamurthi, "On novices' interactions with error messages"

https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mfk-mind-lang-novice-inter-error-msg

A rare empirical study that I found extremely useful.

Outside of a univ course, my lessons are slightly different from the paper's:

• Maintain a map of error messages for a project, use this to minimize the vocabulary of error messages.
• Be enigmatic rather than risk misleading.
• Make affordances beyond error messages optional. Color-coding has a cost. Not highlighting may be better.

permalink

I'm tempted to blindly implement https://github.com/JonathanMEdwards/subtext10/blob/master/doc/language.md in Mu without questioning any of its design choices.

permalink

Hackiest possible support for rendering Unicode combining characters using GNU Unifont

This is the equivalent of backing up a typewriter by one character and overlaying a second letter on the same space.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

permalink

Unicode in Mu's network-less read-only browser

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Before:

After:

permalink

The Mu computer now loads 140KB of Unicode glyphs from its system font

Unicode blocks now supported: latin, greek, cyrillic, armenian, hebrew, arabic, syriac, thaana, n'ko, indian (ISCII), sinhala, thai, lao, tibetan, myanmar, georgian (< U+1100)

Caveats:

• No support for combining characters yet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character) This makes the other languages I know (Hindi, Tamil) well-nigh useless.
• Unifont's glyphs for the non-Latin languages I know turn out to be quite spectacularly ugly.

permalink

A network-less, read-only browser built up from machine code

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-2021-08-15 (video; 5 minutes; includes instructions to try it out)

A lot gets said about simplicity in software, about essential vs accidental complexity. If you really want a simple stack that empowers everyone, it isn't enough to just eliminate accidental complexity (even if we could all agree on what it is). You need to also avoid other people's essential complexity.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

permalink