GoKawiil
Tech News
MartyPC is an open-source emulator for early IBM PC and compatible machines, running on Windows, Linux and macOS. Built from scratch by a hobbyist learning Rust, it now offers cycle-by-cycle accurate emulation of the Intel 8088 CPU, validated against a real 8088 chip wired to an Arduino MEGA.
Snap! is a block-based programming environment designed to be approachable for beginners while still supporting rigorous computer science education. It extends the block-programming style popularized by Scratch but adds features that let users build higher-order functions, recursion, and other advanced concepts typically reserved for text-based languages.
The piece walks through Logo's structure, showing how programmers define new procedures using 'to' and 'end' and combine simple shapes like squares into more complex ones like flowers and gardens. It notes that user-defined procedures behave identically to built-in primitives, so there's no visible distinction between them once written.
A programmer has released Bespoke, a tongue-in-cheek statically typed language that requires every command to begin with a polite greeting and end with an acknowledgement, using the .charming file extension. Dubbed 'The Queen's Code,' it treats the compiler, output console, host environment and shared objects as parties deserving formal correspondence rather than blunt instructions. The project pokes fun at the terse, imperative tone of conventional programming syntax, and its creator notes the implementation is far less developed than its etiquette rules.