A small evening project where I made a simple site designed for Vivalidi’s sidebar to quickly lookup two-letter country codes defined in ISO-3166-1 alpha 2.
Posts in "Devlog"
Here’s the coding projects I’ve been working on in my spare time.
Dusted off Podcast Favourites (last commit 25 April 2022) and fixed a longstanding issue of thumbnails being lost when they’re changed in the feed. Editing the feed properties will now force a refresh of the thumbnail URLs. Didn’t need to change anything else, which was a nice change.
UCL: Some Updates
Made a few minor changes to UCL. Well, actually, I made one large change. I’ve renamed the foreach builtin to for.
I was originally planning to have a for loop that worked much like other languages: you have a variable, a start value, and an end value, and you’d just iterate over the loop until you reach the end. I don’t know how this would’ve looked, but I imagined something like this:
Idea for UCL: Methods
I’m toying with the idea of adding methods to UCL. This will be similar to the methods that exist in Lua, in that they’re essentially functions that pass in the receiver as the first argument, although methods would only be definable by the native layer for the first version.
Much like Lua though, methods would be invokable using the : “pair” operator.
strs:to-upper "Hello" --> HELLO The idea is to make some of these methods on the types themselves, allowing their use on literals and the result of pipelines, as well as variables:
UCL: Iterators
Still working on UCL in my spare time, mainly filling out the standard library a little, like adding utility functions for lists and CSV files. Largest change made recently was the adding iterators to the mix of core types. These worked a lot like the streams of old, where you had a potentially unbounded source of values that could only be consumed one at a time. The difference with streams is that there is not magic to this: iterators work like any other type, so they could be stored in variables, passed around methods, etc (streams could only be consumed via pipes).
This week’s distraction: building a Wordle clone. No particular reason for doing this other than I felt like building one, although I did miss the small time waster of the original Wordle, and watching a game show with my parents that had a similar concept just made those feelings stronger. Main difference between this and Wordle classic: board randomly selects between 4-letter, 5-letter, and 6-letter words; no daily limit or social-media sharing when you guessed the word correctly; and the biggest one: UK English spelling.
Some remarks on how this was built: I used 11ty to build the static site. It originally started as just a HTML page with some JavaScript, but I wanted to leave the option open for bundling and minifying the JS with Stimulus. The dictionary I got from Hunspell, which is apparently the spell checker Apple has based their work on. There is a little bit of Go to filter and sort the dictionary of words. The words are in sorted order for the binary search algorithm to check if a word exists or not. The puzzle order is predetermined and was done by “shuffling” the indices in a separate array. Base styles are, of course, from simple.css.
If you’re interested in checking it out, you can find it here. Just be aware that it may not be as polished as much of the other stuff you find out there. Turns out that I can tolerate a fair few shortcomings in things that I build for my own amusement.
Learnt a very import thing about Stimulus outlets this evening: the outlet name must match the controller name of the outlet target. If this is not the case, the outlet will not bind and you’d be beside yourself struggling to find out why the outlet target cannot be found.
The outlet identifier in the host controller must be the same as the target controller’s identifier.
Took me 30 minutes and stepping through with code with the debugger to find this out.
Started filling out the UCL website, mainly by documenting the core modules. It might be a little unnecessary to have a full website for this, given that the only person who’ll get any use from it right now will be myself. But who knows how useful it could be in the future? If nothing else, it’s a showcase on what I’ve been working on for this project.
I’ve been using UCL a lot recently, which is driving additional development on it. Spent a fair bit of time this evening fixing bugs and adding small features like string interpolation. Fix a number of grammar bugs too, that only popped up when I started writing multi-line scripts with it.
Project Update: DSL Formats For Interactive Fiction
Still bouncing around things to work on at the moment. Most of the little features have been addressed, and I have little need to add anything pressing for the things I’ve been working on recently. As for the large features, well apathy’s taking care of those. But there is one project that is tugging at my attention. And it’s a bit of a strange one, as part of me just wants to kill it.