Welcome to the much neglected sUTL blog!

In the last few days I've had a bunch of new subscribers to this blog. You're still the few and the proud, don't get me wrong, but on the other hand the number of subscribers, in a relative sense, has gone through the roof, enough that one day we may enter double digits. I dare to dream.

However, this has left me in an embarrassing situation, because this blog's been a bit of a dead thing.

So I thought I'd better just make a little noise, a proof of life.

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Doot!

So what's been going on since 2016 when I last posted?

I've had my head down coding away in startup land, on a very cool product that seriously uses sUTL (as well as a lot of other tech).

I've also been working heavily on some new ideas for distributed programming in Python on Google App Engine, and writing about those in my Medium publication, The Infinite Machine.

I last posted about sUTL Haxe. That project was successful, with a "but", which is but, the Haxe->Python interpreter is too slow to use. So I'm still actively using the old handcoded Python version.

One part of my development rhythm is that I tend to do a push on the serious yak shaving stuff over my summer break; that's coming up. I don't like to plan too much, because then I'll just resent my plan and do something else, but if I were going to plan, it'd look like this:

  • Give the python interpreter some love; it's got a couple of divergences from the Haxe->Javascript version. 
  • Get the Haxe->Javascript version into npm! Ye gods, this thing's got to be available to javascript developers in a way they can actually access.
  • Expand the sUTL test suite, get proper coverage.
  • Stand up a dedicated build server for different versions of sUTL, handling transpiling Haxe to other languages, and building packages and so forth.
  • Bonus points: Get a version going in a new language (just using Haxe), all wrapped up and ready to use. I'm thinking PHP really needs a version of sUTL.

That seems like a bit of work. 

Hey, if you've read this far, and you're interested in doing something with sUTL, but want some pointers or whatever, please do ask questions. I'll try to answer them, and I'll post useful stuff (answers!) to this blog.