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Switching to "Twitter Mode"

In the last two weeks, I've validated a solution to the riskiest part of the project. I plan to break the dependency on the Python interpreter using a variation on the strategy described in the last post.

Because of this, and the fact that I made rapid progress on OSH with the spec tests, I now see a clear path to an initial release of OSH.

Blog Problems

However, I need to change my strategy toward blogging in the near term. I'm reluctant to do that because it's gotten great feedback:

• "I've just read 18 entries in one day"
• "It's a great example of how to write a blog"
• "The educational value is phenomenal"
• "I love your writing style"

The first half of the blog was coherent because:

• I coded for six months before blogging. With time, thoughts form more fully. I was able to see the implications of certain coding decisions.
• I edited heavily, writing perhaps twice the amount of text that I published.

But blogging and coding simultaneously is awkward because:

• I frequently change my mind based on the results of experiments. This is good for the code, but bad for the blog.
• Despite the goal to write every day, many posts took multiple days to complete. This distracted from the coding.

I've been writing less frequently because of this awkwardness, which means the blog is out of date. This is true even on top of the the blog post bankruptcy I declared less than two months ago.

But I've completed more than one successful experiment in the last few weeks, and want to keep you all updated.

So here's the plan:

• Switch to "Twitter mode" until the first OSH release. That is, I'll give short status updates which shouldn't require much editing. There will be fewer curated links and code examples, because those take up writing time.
• After the release, take a week or two to write fully-formed posts. I expect that I'll want a break from coding.

Planned Updates

I want to write short updates on these topics:

• OPy Front End. A successful experiment with three pieces of code. Bugs fixed.
• OPy VM. A successful experiment with CPython.
• Code Coverage Tools (the relevance will become clear)
  • Python coverage using coverage.py.
  • C coverage using both LLVM and GCC. Relation to the LST.
• What an OSH 0.1 release should look like.
• Blog Retrospective #2. Because the first retrospective was a long time ago.
• Review of Roadmap #4. Things have already changed. What survived and what became obsolete.

After the OSH 0.1 release:

• Project Retrospective. How we got here. The Oil language.
• Roadmap #5. Using Oil to build OVM.

Reminder

I may not syndicate the short updates to Lobsters and Hacker News as much. If you want updates, subscribe to /r/oilshell on Reddit or follow @oilshellblog on Twitter.