December 29, 2010

Checking in again..

So it seems like I've been away for a long time again, and I'm afraid to say that that's true. The festive season was once again upon us, visitors for Thanksgiving and Christmas and of course the continuing pressence of the littl'n has all but removed any time to make code progress on NickOS. That's not to say I haven't been working hard on it though, I've bought a couple of books on hardware, to try and get my head around some of the challenges that lie ahead, and I've been looking at memory management algorithms as that's the next step in my development.

I've also been looking at writing my own language, on which to build NickOS. I always had the intention that the OS should allow for web-like scripting, providing a kind of DOM  (Desktop Object Model) that could be easily hooked in to via a JS like language. But this is more about a language to write NickOS in at a more basic level. I know it's a big lump to bite off and chew, but I don't like C much and I do like the expressiveness of Lisp and the Lisp like languages. I also like the functional approach (though it's taking its sweet time making much sense to me) as the idea that we should generally look to program without side effects, really appeals.

So, I'm hacking around with the syntax and structure of a NickOS language. Half of me likes the Lisp brackets, whilst the other half likes the C/Java style of curly braces. And then, I've also been looking at Python and Haskell with their 'spaces mean something' approach. Not sure I like that, though I can't justify that feeling yet.

So busy busy busy, but very little to show. I've not forgotten about NickOS and I'll be back, hopefully early in the new year, with something more concrete to talk about.

I'll leave with a final thought, and that was about the name of this little project. NickOS got it's name, funnily enough, from my name, Nick, but I'm now thinking of changing it...but perhaps with a link back to the old name. Was thinking about NOKI but that seems to be some kind of phone tool, what-d'ya reckon?