Greetings from the lurker's pool

[Tom Novelli]

Welcome back, Derek...

I think Lisp is the way to go for rewriting your compiler.  I messed
around with C, Forth, Assembler for years before I realized that the
"slow scripting languages" (Python, Perl, Ruby, Javascript, Lua, etc.)
would be better for parser/compiler experimentation.  But those have
problems too, problems the Lisp/Scheme community solved a long time
ago because they weren't distracted by syntax.  I switched over to PLT
MzScheme a few months ago and I'm very pleased with it; it's clean but
not minimalist, with all the good qualities of Python except for terse
syntax.

Tunes itself is slow these days but Lisp is making a comeback.  If you
were to get comfortable with Lisp/Scheme this year, I think you'd be
well prepared to contribute when we finally get the ball rolling.  And
if you have anything to offer in the meantime, great.  We're planning
to set up a GIT repository to share our little hacks... pretty soon.

Speaking of midi, I just stumbled across 'aeolus', a pipe organ
synthesizer.  The setup was tough but the sound was impressive!

Tom


>  I have been following TUNES for maybe 10 years or so, on and off.  I haven't
>  been on the mailing list for most of that time, though I did post early on.
>  The last few days I've been skimming the websites and archives to get up to
>  speed, and decided to reintroduce myself.
>
>  As for my background, most of my experience is with c/c++.  I have a little
>  (but not much) experiance in plenty of other languages, and recently I've
>  been working to become more proficient with CL.  I am something of a
>  generalist I suppose. I use all of FreeBSD, Linux, and windows as my
>  operating systems, and do some fairly light-duty network administration type
>  work as well.  A long time ago (as part of a class), wrote an almost-working
>  compiler.  I had left the design open for retargetability (if that is a
>  word), as well as having multiple input languages as well.  However, I found
>  that the way I organized it, the code became far to unwieldy after a while.
>  This is what I was actually trying to avoid when I planned the system out,
>  and at first it appeared to work brilliantly.  I have always been interested
>  in reworking this in another, more flexible or extensible language (like
>  Lisp).  I did come across a project to add aspect oriented programming to a
>  c++ environment, and it was interesting because the author(s) inspiration
>  for it was almost identical to my experience (they wrote a compiler using
>  the same ideas I did, and ran into the same problem).  However, I'm weary
>  now about using c++ for a project like this...
>  I also had a project to implement my own "modular synth" audio and midi (and
>  eventually video or any data stream) system, much like puredata and max/MSP
>  (and there are several others), which never got far off the ground.  Apart
>  from these I read a lot, though I am underread compared with many on this
>  list, I'm interested with pretty much all software engineering type topics,
>  and especially anything high level, abstract, and grandiose.
>
>  I am curious what sort of work is being done most actively right now?
>
>  I'd also like to hear suggestions of where to contribute if anyone has them.
>
>  _derek
>
>