Time to get cracking

"This business isn't for men of words," said Borja. "It's for men of action."

A. Perez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

I have some ideas for Effes that I haven't written about yet, but it's time to take a break from this exploratory spec work and get some concrete stuff done. I'm going to handle this in four stages:

1. Feature freeze: Done, as of... now. In order to make Effes what I want it to be, I will eventually features such as easy exec'ing to shell (hopefully as easy as it is in bash), easy parsing of inputs from shells, and other things. Eventually I'll probably need a multithreading model, too. But for now, I'm going to say that anything I haven't discussed so far isn't making it to this first pass.
2. Informally figuring out the syntax: In other words, me toying around in vim to figure out what I want programs to look like.
3. Coming up with a spec: Basically, stabilizing the doodles from the previous step and formalizing them.
4. Implementation: I have no idea how I'll do this. Hopefully I'll be brave enough to try and use Haskell until Effes can bootstrap itself. I'm going to have to read up on type inference, aren't I? Yikes.

Stage 2, which is the one I'm in right now, probably won't yield much interesting blog material. Stage 3 might, and I hope stage 4 will — though it'll probably more about me learning Haskell than about Effes, at that point. In the meanwhile, I've got some rants and mouth-foaming that might kill some time. Didn't I promise a rant about Guava's Optional<T> a few months ago?