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by ret2pop 778 days ago
ding! I think the bootstrapping code might've bitten us. Of course there's no practical reason why we _needed_ to not have the delim flag flipped and a couple of delimiters defined, but there's a conceptual symmetry in it being the way it is. Still, I agree in large part with your point.

It seems as though you've read the entire article and understood a decent portion of it. I'm impressed because I think I explained this suboptimally.
1 comments
vidarh 778 days ago
I think it's fine to show that you can do it, I think the main thing is to flip the order a bit.

E.g. "here's a cool thing thing we can do <demonstrate the outcome of significantly changing a readable syntax>" to hook people, "here's how <show how you change syntax with higher level helpers>", "and if you really want to know how to bootstrap this from basics <here comes the linenoise>".

Maybe compare how e.g. Forth is often introduced, with how people describe bootstrapping of a simplistic Forth like Jonesforth or Sectorforth [2]. Showing people how they can define their own words and it fundamentally changes how they work with the language afterwards is cool to a lot of people who have no interest in details like how you an implement even numbers with a minimal set of primitives (e.g. Sectorforth relies on that - it doesn't have builtin numbers[3]).

Both are interesting to me, but I'm weird, and I think for most people it'd be easier to maintain their interest if those two aspects are either separate articles or at least if the bootstrapping is relegated to a standalone section they're clearly told they can skip.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368212

[2] https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth

[3] The Sectorforth Hello world defines every numeric constant it needs like this:

    : -1 ( x -- x -1 ) dup dup nand dup dup nand and ;
    : 0 -1 dup and ;
    : 1 -1 dup + dup and ;
    : 2 1 1 + ;
    : 4 2 2 + ;
    : 6 2 4 + ;
Which is fun if you're a language geek. Not so convincing if you want to know if Forth is fort you [EDIT: That mistake was wholly unintentional, but I'll leave it].
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