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liamilanon What you learn by making a new programming language

I built Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb) a year ago, before starting university. It completely changed the way I conceptualized programming as a whole. You start feeling deja-vu every time you open a new language, and the "ah-ha!" feeling you get when you see something in another language you had to think about when implementing your own is super rewarding.

A year later (this summer) I used Crumb to land my first job at a pretty cool startup! The payoff was way more than I could have ever expected.

liamilanon Crafting Interpreters

It was my first time making a language, so I built into the language whatever was needed to build something cool with Crumb.

Wanted first class functions to simplify the parse step (they can be treated like any other value), but I needed a different mechanism to invoke “native code” vs user-defined methods, so there’s two different types for that.

Needed some kind of compound data type, but I didn’t want to deal with side effects from pass by reference, so Crumb implements lists, but they are always pass by value :)

P.s. theres some pretty neat stuff build with Crumb at https://github.com/topics/crumb if anyone’s interested!

liamilanon Crafting Interpreters

Read Crafting Interpreters when building Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb). It was indispensable, especially the sections on scope and local variables. The balance between technical implementation and conceptual insights is super helpful, especially when trying to go off of the book’s set path.

It’s inspiring to see technical writing done like this. As an aspiring engineer, this sets a really high standard to aim for - excellent resource.

liamilanon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2024)

  Location: Vancouver, BC
  Remote: Yes, can work onsite/hybrid as well
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, Express, Python, Poetry, Flask, Git, Java, C, C++
  Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rxE6SmDzM02jQikSbBFKIH1-ptAQ8rV6/view?usp=sharing
  Email: liamilanyvr@gmail.com

Hi! I'm Liam, a freshman at UBC, aiming to specialize in Computer Science/Physics. Looking for a software related internship in the summer. I've been programming for 7 years, and built dozens of projects, most of them can be found on my Github (https://github.com/liam-ilan).

Over the summer, I built Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb), a programming language from scratch, which was front paged here a couple months ago! I'm also a member of the firmware team at UBC Formula Electric, working on porting firmware for the Front Sensor Module to our next car.

Open to doing just around anything you need me to do. If you have an opening, or any advice, hit me up :D

liamilanon The Flix Programming Language

Just a friendly UBC piggyback on Waterloo’s programming language ;)

Over summer, I built my own little functional language, Crumb (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb). Unlike Flix, the scope is tiny, but some pretty awesome stuff has been done with it. (Checkout this pixel art editor in your terminal, 100% Crumb: https://github.com/ronilan/crumbicon).

There’s a template (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb-template) and vscode highlighter (https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb-vscode) for anyone who wants to mess around with it. Any feedback super appreciated :D

liamilanon Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter

Robert Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters (https://craftinginterpreters.com/) is an awesome resource :D

Though I didn't implement his language exactly, a lot of what he talks about carries over anywhere. It especially helped me figure out how to handle the memory management and scoping.

Vincent Jacques' DrawGrammar (https://jacquev6.github.io/DrawGrammar/) was also super helpful. Getting to see the syntax definition visually made writing it so much easier :).

liamilanon Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter

Thanks!

liamilanon Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter

Yeah actually, stay tuned! :D

liamilanon Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter

Crumb is garbage collected (there is no need to manually allocated/deallocate memory)... though there is no background "garbage collector" process running... The interpreter for Crumb is a tree-walk interpreter, and it just frees memory whenever it can... Crumb frees memory in the following cases:

1) When a function is finished, all memory related to the scope of that runtime is freed.

2) When an value is not returned out of a statement, or assigned to a variable, said value is freed.

3) When a function is applied, if an argument has no reference (it is not stored in a variable), it is freed.

4) Additionally, if the function itself has no reference (such as in the case of an immediately invoked function), it is freed.

Hope that clarifies things a bit :D

liamilanon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2023)

  Location: Vancouver, BC
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, Express, Python, Poetry, Flask, Git, Java, Matplotlib and more
  Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oXe10o0N2EJdYOyCrMbV56WDVK_U3Ac/view?usp=sharing
  Email: liamilanyvr@gmail.com

Hi! I'm Liam, just graduated from high school, going into UBC Sciences next year, and looking for a programming related internship/mentorship/job. I'm a snowboard instructor during the winter season, so I have some work experience. I've been programming for 7 years, but have never worked professionally in the field, mostly working on personal projects.

My most recent project is a database of electron orbital probability distribution renders done in Python and Matplotlib: https://liam-ilan.github.io/electron-orbitals/

Check out my GitHub: https://github.com/liam-ilan

Open to doing just around anything you need me to do. If you have an opening, or any advice, hit me up :D

liamilanon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2022)

  Location: Vancouver, BC
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, Express, Python, Poetry, Flask, Git, Java, and more
  Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oXe10o0N2EJdYOyCrMbV56WDVK_U3Ac/view?usp=sharing
  Email: liamilanyvr@gmail.com

Hi! I'm Liam, 16, and looking for a programming related internship/mentorship/job. I'm a snowboard instructor during the winter season, so I have some work experience. I've been programming for 6 years, but have never worked professionally in the field, mostly working on personal projects. You can find some of them at https://www.liamilan.com/ Open to doing just around anything you need me to do. If you have an opening, or any advice, hit me up :D

liamilanon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2022)

Location: Vancouver, BC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, Express, Python, Poetry, Flask, Git, Java, and more

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oXe10o0N2EJdYOyCrMbV56WDVK...

Email: liamilanyvr@gmail.com

liamilanon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2022)

  Location: Vancouver, BC
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: JavaScript, Node.js, Express, Python, Poetry, Flask, Git, Java, and more
  Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oXe10o0N2EJdYOyCrMbV56WDVK_U3Ac/view?usp=sharing
  Email: liamilanyvr@gmail.com

You can find some of them at https://www.liamilan.com/

Open to doing just around anything you need me to do. If you have an opening, or any advice, hit me up :D

liamilanon Show HN: An anonymous chatting app for anyone to deploy

Thanks for the tip! Added!

liamilanon Show HN: My 7th Grade Young Entrepreneur Project -- interactive holiday cards

We also crashed the server.

Fixed now.

liamilanon Show HN: My 7th Grade Young Entrepreneur Project -- interactive holiday cards

Thanks, fixed!!!!

I'm Liam, Ella's brother, I built the server. It was the first time I wrote a node server. It's a rookie mistake...

;(

liamilanon Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

Thanks Steve!

I watched your video and although I don't understand everything, I learned a lot. Separating my program into functions is a good idea. Your video clarified the map function for me.

Through your video, I understood that I was running code multiple times, when it only needs to run once (how I parsed my rules was one of these instances that you went over in your video), so thanks for pointing that out.

Again, thank you so much for taking the time to review my code. I really enjoyed your feedback.

liamilanon Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

Thanks for pointing that out. Fixed.

liamilanon Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

Thanks a ton!

Tell your son that it took me a while, and a lot of work, but it feels great to finish something (there are a lot of projects that I don't finish...).

I began learning using Scratch a long time ago. They even featured me last year (the project was a solar system in which I used sine and cosine to calculate the rotation of the planets). I then used blocklike.js to move to JS.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I like The Coding Train, Carykh, and Code Bullet, and I get a lot of my ideas from their projects.

liamilanon Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

I'm not sure. I'm always messing around with different projects.

I used blocklike.js to jump from Scratch to JavaScript. Then I worked for months on this one game for the app store called Sticky Quest. You can find it here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sticky-quest/id1425679649?mt... This how I learned how to use npm packages such as Cordova and Eslint.

liamilanon Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

Thanks! You're right, I fixed it.

liamilanon Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

Thank you! I'm watching a lot of Youtube videos. This is how I got to cellular automata. My dad showed me git last week.