Reviewing December 2023
I started December by participating in the Advent of Code for the first week until I didn't have enough time before breakfast to continue. I did the challenges in Ruby first with a bit of code golfing to produce short solutions and then I rewrote some of them in MOROS Lisp to improve the language like I did last year.
It was fun. I customized my boot script to start directly into the Lisp interpreter and removed the need to load the core library manually. This allowed me to go straight to coding after turning on the computer.
The language improved significantly with the addition of a dict type to
complement list, a host function to resolve hostnames, escape sequences
like \e to print ANSI colors easily, and more!
Additionally, I implemented a hash command to compute the SHA256 digest of a
file to make sure I can download and copy files without errors.
At the beginning of the month I also started a new project called Nyx to have a bedrock platform to build MOROS. It's currently based on Alpine Linux and provides a minimalist text-based Linux host with the same look and feel as MOROS.
After that I updated this website and changed its theme from solarized to gruvbox that I've been using everywhere since 2019. I really like the result.
The rest of the first 3 weeks was spent on polishing a release of MOROS 0.10.2 in time for the winter solstice.
In the last week I took a coding break to try to see what data I could salvage from 22 hard drives of past computers from the last 30 years. The oldest drives no longer work, but most from around the year 2000 are still surprisingly in good condition, whereas many produced after that are either dead or full of errors.