Orchid runs!

It's very far from done, but now I'm motivated to get shit done! My optimizations can now have measurable impact! The hypothetical examples no longer have to be hypothetical!!!

I literally spent a week fighting scope creep instinctively introduced by myself on a submodule with the nominal role *Read all files the compiler needs to read using the fewest possible additional steps*

I have to keep reminding myself that there's no such thing as a scope too narrow. If its purpose can be described without spelling out the implementation, it can be encapsulated.

Lessons from a really big project I will almost certainly finish:

When specifying a program, a lot of inputs become valid which have few to no real use cases, simply because they logically follow from the requirements.
When implementing a specification, some narrow use cases become unexpectedly difficult to handle.

It's important to recognize the intersection and reject it.

I need to finish something presentable by May so I decided to make Orchid an untyped language, and the simplicity of all tasks all of a sudden breaks my heart. Static analysis is my guiding principle, the one feature which I always held to be good. Deprioritizing it in _my own programming language_ feels like sacrilege.

The number of concurrent transformations impacting more than half of the codebase in Orchid surpassed 4, so instead of walking the reference graph for each of these I'm updating the whole codebase, from lexer to runtime, in a single pass.

In this process, I also got to reread a lot of code from a year ago. This is the project I learned Rust with. It's incredible, not just how much better I've gotten at this language, but also how much better I've gotten at structuring code on general.

Interestingly though my problem-solving ability seems to be the same. I can tell this by looking at the utilities I made to solve specific well-defined abstract problems. I may have superficial issues with how the code is spelled out in text, but the logic itself is as good as anything I could come up with today.

Make good progress on Orchid, my pet project, the functional programming language that has no syntax apart from what the macros define. A type system, an interpreter and provisions for a compiler would be nice for a start.

Finish my bachelor's degree on some unspecified part of Orchid, at the current pace that would most likely be just the Hindley-Milner algorithm.

Don't get fired from the gem of a job I have, and move to London because I'm a city rat and the only way I can sleep well apparently is with a tram or drunken people screaming under my window.

I started a rice after 3 years of happily using KDE, and apparently everything uses CSS for styling now? I'm not complaining, Polybar offered like 4 options and we just played around with glyph fonts, compared to that this is a joyride.

Also, Eww is brilliant. I've seen people make full fucking UIs and custom notification centers and shit with it. I don't have that much time on my hands, but the option is there. All this with janky Lisp and Sass.

Eww also confirmed a suspicion of mine regarding Orchid; language adoption is a matter of convenience. I can get people to learn my language by offering cool trinkets and useful tools to people who have a predisposition to learning. Yuck is an aptly named language but it's not totally unusable, and because I had to learn it to make my status bar I'm now more inclined to write the corresponding scripts in it as well and I'm actually quite disappointed that I have to use Bash for that.