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**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you said you're not doing it, so it's -- |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, yeah. I don't think I've really even turned any of them into jobs per se. The thing that I really like about the way that I do my side projects is I have no obligation to any of them. I build something, and if I grow out of it, or if I build the next version, I can just scrap the old one. I can lit... |
\[08:01\] Once you start running a service for other people, 1) it turns into a job where you have to listen to other people and what they want, and 2) there's a lot more liability. You have to be liable for their data, for their security, and I think that then it start turning into a job. Maybe I'll turn one of my pro... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. That's pretty liberating, for sure, because you're in full control of it, and it's like "You know what - I'm just sort of done with that thing." Or "That bug doesn't matter to me." |
**Linus Lee:** Exactly, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You can literally never pay attention to it again and it won't' upset anybody. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah. And I think there's also a lot of shortcuts you can take when you build a tool just for yourself, as opposed to for everybody... How you store your data, how you make some things scalable, or not scalable, and not having to worry about those things, how you do authentication, things like that. You ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I have a lot of code that never leaves my hard disk. It's not for other people. I just wrote it, I don't want it to scale, I don't wanna refactor it so that it's a nice example of code... But it scratches my itch, and I'm fine with that. So the question for you becomes "Why publish them? Why not ... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, for a few reasons. I think the main one that's coming to mind more recently - even if other people can't use the code directly, I think a lot of the effects of me publishing my code is other people looking at it and either seeing that something that they thought was ... |
I think the other effect that it has is to get people to build little things of their own, especially since I can't make them available for everyone to use. A lot of people have come to me and said "Oh, I looked at what you build and it inspired me to go build a clone of it or a similar kind of thing that scratches a s... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, let's dive into Ink. Since you teed it up, let's hit the ball off the tee here. It's your personal programming language, inspired by Go, JavaScript and Lua. My first question is -- I think you've already answered this, but maybe I'll give you another chance... Why not just use Go, JavaScript or L... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Why put all the work in? I mean, you wrote a language in Go. You could have just written your tools in go. |
**Linus Lee:** Yes. I mean, you could ask the same thing about everyone with side projects... Why build anything then, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Linus Lee:** The story of how it came about - I was taking one of the introductory computer science courses at my university, and one of the really fun projects we got to do at the end of the semester was build a really simple Lisp interpreter, which is kind of a pretty common undergrads kind of CS project. And it wa... |
\[12:12\] So I basically took all those complaints that I had about all these languages that I liked and tried to build something that I think looked kind of nice and worked kind of nicely and wasn't too complicated... So I started hacking on it, and it eventually turned into something that worked. And then once it wor... |
But all of it was very iterative. I realized that I could do this thing, and I built a smaller version, and then added onto it, and now I'm here. But it wasn't really anything calculated from the start. It wasn't even really designed to build projects then; I just kind of built it because I thought it was cool to be ab... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How far back does Ink go then? How many iterations, how many years or months? |
**Linus Lee:** So I built it the summer of 2019, so it's been a little over two years. The language itself I think took a couple months on and off to build, and then all the rest of the effort is just adding to the ecosystem, the one-man ecosystem. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And you never intend for anybody else to use Ink. They could use it, but you're not designing it, you're not doing it for the consumption of others. I mean, Jerod might be able to use it, or somebody else might be able to use it, but you're not trying to make it be useful to others. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, that's not really a cool -- because it was my first programming language project and I also feel that there is a lot of little design mistakes and things, regrets that are now kind of baked into the language and baked into these projects and codebases, and I can't make a lot of breaking changes, be... |
**Jerod Santo:** What if they start using it? What if they start opening up feature requests and bug reports, and "I love this thing. I built this little startup on it, and now..." |
**Linus Lee:** That'd be a nightmare. Do not build a startup on Ink. \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** "...and now my startup is doing great, but I just can't get Ink to do X, Y or Z." |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, I mean... That would be pretty crazy. I mean, you do so at your own risk, and if you run into problems... If people run into problems, I try to be helpful and point them to the right resources, or help them make a patch, or something. And if you are running a startup on Ink and you're not completel... |
**Jerod Santo:** So tell us about the language. You designed this thing, you pulled in parts from other languages that you like... How is it like JavaScript, how is it like Go, how is it like Lua? Just some of the aspects of this language that you designed. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, so I would say syntactically it's pretty close to JavaScript, its arrow functions and primitive values, without classes and prototype inheritance... If those words mean things to you. |
**Jerod Santo:** So there's no inheritance then? |
**Linus Lee:** There's no inheritance. It's very Lispy, actually. So there's functions, and there's primitive values, and there's objects, and that's about it. It's also kind of a lot like Lua in that way. It's very simple. And the reason for the simplicity is not anything ideological. It was just like, I didn't know h... |
\[16:04\] A lot of it is simple because I had to build the simplest thing. I didn't wanna spend extra time learning how to do inheritance and operator overloading, and things like that. |
**Jerod Santo:** Are there any other code reuse mechanisms aside from a function? Are there other ways, are there mixins or modules or any way you could get shared utility without -- |
**Linus Lee:** Not really. It's really functions and objects. And I think that actually takes you pretty far. I remember before JavaScript got all these fancy features, you had functions and objects, and you could attach -- you had kind of an inheritance thing, but you really just had functions and objects, and you cou... |
I think one of the things that writing a lot of Ink code has made me appreciate is that you can actually -- a lot of clean code isn't about using a lot of these fancy abstractions. It's just like structuring your functions and objects in basic data flow to make sense and be simple. If you do that, you can still write p... |
**Jerod Santo:** So what about tooling for Ink? Surely, Monocle has some sort of a storage engine or a place that you put your data. Its universal knowledge base kind of a thing. So does Ink have -- how does it interact with the world? Does it have database hooks, or file system hooks, or...? |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah. Built into the interpreter was a couple of different ways the language can talk to the outside world. There is a file system kind of interface, there's a base sort of HTTP networking interface, and things like that, to be able to run servers and save files. There isn't a database driver or anything... |
**Jerod Santo:** So I love that you're still using Ink to this day, even though you said you have regrets... It's a bit of a pet project or a toy project... A lot of people will try to advance in their programming skills in languages that are viable, for a lack of a better word. Like, "I'm investing in the Python commu... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, nobody's gonna hire me to write Ink code for their company... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Linus Lee:** I haven't really ever thought about it. So the main reason that I haven't thought about it is because at my dayjob I write React TypeScript, which is quite popular... And that's gonna put the food on the table. Over time, I think this is a general kind of software engineering realization, but certainly I... |
The other reason it hasn't really concerned me is that a lot of the projects that I've built with Ink are sort of learning projects, so I've built an assembler to learn how Assembly and linking worked. The code there isn't super-reusable in other projects, but a lot of that knowledge is reusable. Like, if someone told ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're still showing up to practice; even if you're not throwing the football, you may be just doing drills, you're running, you understand the philosophy or the -- I'm just using football as an example, but you're still showing up to practice, basically. |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, even if you're not using a football. Throwing something. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:07\] Right. You're still involved in the process and the practice of maybe doing things that excel at programming, but not necessarily -- like, Jerod's question was why not use Go or JavaScript, that is a viable project... Your knowledge, as you said, still carries over, which I think is pretty... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah, so there's actually quite a bit of personal infrastructure associated with building Ink projects. This is probably my favorite thing to talk about with Ink, because I think it's sort of math-sciency. So my editor of choice is Vim, and I keep it pretty barebones, pretty simple; not a lot of plugins,... |
Beyond that, I don't have a lot in Vim itself. I'm pretty proficient with Vim, so I can move around my code easily. It's fast, it's simple, it works. Outside of Vim though, I have quite a bit of tooling. I have Ink Fmt. That's a code formatter for Ink. Once in a while I'll save the code, I'll run the code formatter ove... |
**Jerod Santo:** Wait a second, wait a second... |
**Linus Lee:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** You're the only one that writes Ink. I mean, just however you write it, that's the format, isn't it? \[laughs\] |
**Linus Lee:** It is, but you want your code to-- |
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