I’ve not been at a hack like this in forever, probably since back in college days. I miss them greatly. Seems like it was a good time 😄

Beside your working project, did you pick up any other interesting tid bits you’d take away? New thoughts on how to refine your ideas on the topic, that kinda stuff.

One unanticipated direction I find my thoughts going is to create "self-swallowing" LÖVE apps where you can edit the source code right from within the app. LÖVE apps are already pretty easy to install and run; what if the editing environment was also as self-contained. Any time you run such an app you also have all the tools to modify it, right there within the app.

For a while during the week I thought, "this is just a silly experiment, this isn't going to go anywhere because people can't use their own tools." But it might work if it provides a lot of convenience over the status quo.

I’m in the love with the idea of runtime modifications. It’s exactly what made me enjoy Python and even a bit of Ruby way back when, I’m that the interpreter let you basically do whatever you want to definitions, functions, what have you. I want that ability in Swift.

I think interpreted languages are close to this since they do the whole loop thing, but I can’t help but believe that a smarter, fancier compilation evolution from incremental stuff is a way to make static/strongly typed languages have this ability too.

Sweet demo! I’d love to apply this technique when developing physics algorithm work (like for network diagrams), especially to watch what happens in the frames before a crash, like in a comic strip. there’s a VSCode extension that lets you build custom renderers for program state when you drop into the debugger made by Hediet that you may be interested in.