May 2020 Slow and not steady

May 4, 2020

Benjamin Nitschke

The corona pandemic didn't affect us much, but we did do home office work for most employees away from the Delta Engine company since mid March, for some employees things worked out great, for others it wasn't a very productive time. Also talking about ideas and just putting stuff up on whiteboards just works much better in person. Things are back to normal now and the AI and robot hardware work is heating up at the office ^^

Sadly progress on the Strict IntelliJ plugin is very slow and Merlin, who did a lot of the early work recently and was leading the IntelliJ platform sdk work, is stepping back a bit. I will try to find a replacement and try to finish the IntelliJ plugin work. We didn't have much time to work on the website, the language changed quite a lot into a more functional style, while still being fully declarative and test driven. The IntelliJ IDE is still being worked on and once that is finished the language will go into a much more useable state and we can let it lose on some employees.

Apr 2020 Sdk going open source

April 8, 2020

Benjamin Nitschke

Strict was always supposed to be open source, Merlin pushed a bit to get some parts released. Upcoming work is to write the low level language framework (apps, io, logs, math, files, etc.) and to allow anyone writing any code, the strict compiler needs to be out there as well, so we decided to release the https://github.com/strict-lang/sdk finally on github (the compiler is currenty all written in go and can't bootstrap itself yet).

I also ran a logo contest last month and we created some basic graphics for the website, ide, libraries, file types, etc. Kirsten still wants to do some mascot work when she finds time and we are still all adding more stuff to the https://strict.dev/docs/Overview alt text

Feb 2020 Still work in progress

February 24, 2020

Benjamin Nitschke

We didn't have much time to work on the website, the language changed quite a lot into a more functional style, while still being fully declarative and test driven. The IntelliJ IDE is still being worked on and once that is finished the language will go into a much more useable state and we can let it lose on some employees.

Originally I wanted to post a roadmap, but since we don't really have a development team working on this and I pretty much do this in my spare time plus getting some help here and there, development speed is still slow. The current focus is getting IntelliJ IDE up and running with our own parser/lexer in the upcomming months. Write small hello worlds in the console is fine, but for any productive work an IDE is needed imo. My exployees at Delta Engine are also my guinea pigs for Strict and without ReSharper and NCrunch we just ain't gonna get happy.

So next up is adding SCrunch working to make writing TDD code even more fun, after that work on backends (C#, C++, Java) should be completed and finally work on Stricti can start (which is the basic idea letting AI Neural Networks try to generate some simple code based on the user just writing tests for the code to be generated).

Jan 2020 website is up

January 17, 2020

Benjamin Nitschke

This blog is all about the development of the Strict programming language, which has the main goal allowing computers/AI to understand and write their own code with it. While Strict might look similar to C like languages or python, go, lua or lisp, clojure or scheme because of its basic functional nature, it differentiates from all programming languages I know about by the simple fact that it is 100% TDD (test driven development) and the code being very strict on what you can and can't do, thus often leading to only one correct implementation. At least that is the idea so far.

Earlier versions of strict already existed around 10 years ago (shoutout to Irony Compiler Kit) and ~20 years ago on paper/early concepts and while they worked as a very simple language, they were not useful or productive at all. It is very hard to build an ecosystem around a language, so the new strategy for this year is to make use of the Strict language early at work (generating c++, cleanup c#, connect libraries, useful stuff). Also the goal is to create a language that can be written by computers, not to build frameworks, libraries or support general user usecases. As long as it is possible we will try to utilize existing languages, libraries and frameworks by simply calling them, not reinvent them. The Strict backend can generate C++, C# and Java code anyway, so this part should be easy as long as there is no close integration needed (like database or UI code, let's not do that right now).

Today was about setting up this website: After trying out https://jekyllrb.com/ and many themes and plugins after checking out the even more complex https://gohugo.io/ it turns out these are not good fits for the Strict language, which should be easy to install and work immediately. https://docusaurus.io/en/ is a project that is installed with one line and works instantly after downloading all the dependencies automatically, on any platform that supports node.

Well, not much on here yet, we will add documentation over time and get more speed on the road in 2020.

My previous blog (2004-2016): http://BenjaminNitschke.com

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