This website was almost entirely written using an old chromebook I had lying around, largely while laying on the floor of my kids room after I'd read to them until they were alseep, as sort of an experiment into how much you could code purely using a web browser (answer: quite a bit!). I started using jsfiddle but then move it to Glitch. Also, if you don't know about Glitch, I highly recommend you check it out. Really perfect for this sort of thing. Cheers to the clitch people.
This side-project started out as a way to write a parser in JavaScript by hand, which I started while needing something to pass the time on a sick day. But the main inspiration was:
- Turtle Geometry by Hal Abelson and Andrea diSessa. I have not implement the full turtle graphics notation, yet.
- Mindstorms by Seymour Papert
- The magic of using an Apple IIe as a child.
My original intention was to write everything myself with no dependencies, as sort of a learning excercise. But ultimately shipping products is more fun that doing everything by hand. I'm sure I'll write a Pratt Parser one day. I ended up using these libraries and tools:
- jquery-console for the console emulator.
- PEG.js to generate the parser.
- NewCSS
- The excellent VT323 font by Peter Hull and hosted on google fonts.
- ANSI Shadow font from this site for the title page.
In addition, I consulted js-turtle code but wrote the turtle library myself. I'm sure there were a ton of stackoverflow and similar posts I consulted, too many to even remember. If you write answers to questions online, thank you!
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