Rel4tion-Wiki/news/tutorial-fun.mdwn

[[!tag /news]]
[[!meta title="Tutorial Fun"]]
[[!meta updated="2015-02-01"]]

Just in case anyone is reading this - the place may be quiet, but it's lively!
I'm advancing with Haskell, writing short programs for practice and mostly
working on [[/projects/Idan]], the information language.

I've been writing the tutorial for a while now - `git log` says since 01-14
which is 2.5 weeks ago. It's fun. I'm adding new cool features, trying many new
ideas, making mistakes and learning from them... It's mostly a mix of syntax
concepts from Haskell, from Turtle, maybe a tiny tiny bit from Python and Lua,
and my own ideas (which sometimes look like Perl but it's unintentional).

As the language is gaining more and more syntax forms, I'm beginning to worry
it won't be as friendly and as simple as I want it to be. There's also the
issue of built-in support for names, descriptions, labels and prefixes: Should
that go to another higher level language, or should I try to make Idan the
one-suits-all language with all the features? It's hard to say because it's
just an information language, not a programming language. Maybe adding extras
isn't such a big deal.

Hey, I could add support for them through a template system! Sounds
interesting, I'm adding this as a TODO to the tutorial.

In parallel to writing the tutorial, I'm going to start working with Darcs and
Haskell on the Idan parser and serializer. Once I create a darcs repo, I'll set
up Darcsweb to make it public, in parallel to the existing gitweb.

[[!meta author=fr33domlover]]