Pondering In Early 2012

Well after what was quite good Christmas break I have returned to coding with some enthusiasm.


Prior to the Christmas holidays I was feeling burned out and had not been coding at home very much. The culminated in getting a severer cold over the break. While this was not much fun it did mean I rested and barely touched a computer over the whole break. Well except for the 360 that is.


My other half and even the little people where also warn out so it was a very slow Christmas break for us. 


Anyway onto tech stuff as after all this is what this blog focuses on. I have been playing with the all new all singing dart language. Overall I quite like it. 


In a previous post I mentioned I planned to carry on coding in Dart. Well I have been rethinking that, partly because there are still a number of bugs in the libraries with things like requestAnimationFrame not being properly supported. It is possible to work around this and bugs in such an early stage of development of a language is totally acceptable. 


What broke the camels back was when I put on some trance music, sat down with some coffee, clicked run on the Dart IDE and waited and waited. The compiler is just so slow (I assume the compiler is the bit that is slow). I dislike the compile times in C++ but put up with them because I get paid to do so. 


When coding at home I really want fast compilers and minimal waiting. I am often tired when coding at home so waits can result broken concentration often because I am checking twitter...


My laptop is quite old (about 2 years) but was in the mid to upper range of power when it was purchased. I tried the dart IDE on my work computer which is definitely high end. It was faster but not exactly speedy. 


I thought about this for a while and decided while I really like the feel of dart and it has the potential to be fun to use but I am not going to devote much time to it in the next few months. I will track it's development over the coming months and when I see a good time to jump back onto that ship I will do so.


That left the question of what to code in? Not wanting to go on a journey of finding another programming language I decided to return to CoffeeScript. 


I got my gvim set up updated and the latest version coffeescript installed. A nice thing is that now microsoft have invest time/money into nodejs you and now install nodejs onto a window machine and with one simple command install coffeescript. I use Linux at home but occasionally want to hack over a lunch time. 


So this is the current plan. Code in CoffeeScript and write what comes to mind, this will probably mean I am going to churn out a few games over the next few months. And of course an update to two to my android apps, this is sort of a background task that goes on.