I'm trying to write code in 100 different programming languages. I just finished week 2, and--somehow--I'm ahead of schedule.

The full list of languages and links to code are in my 100-languages repository.

Summary

After two weeks of "staying on (or ahead of) schedule", I strongly suspect I will not be continuing at this current pace of writing code in at least one new language per day. It's fun and oddly addictive, but also fairly time-consuming. If I don't slow down, I'll probably get burned out and abandon the project (or need to become a hermit), so I'll likely slow way down for the next week.

Languages

Here are the languages that were new to me at the beginning of the week that I managed to write code in:

• COBOL-85
• WebGPU Shading Language (which I'm still surprised to learn is "WebGPU Shading Language" and not "WebGPU Shader Language", in its official spec)
• WebAssembly Text Format (I had seen this before, but never written it)
• Scratch (block-based)
• Commodore Basic 2.0
• XOD (flow-based)

And here are the languages I'd used before (mostly only used a little bit or a long time ago):

• XSLT
• Perl
• AWK (not 100% sure if I've actually used this before, but it seems likely)
• Verilog
• EXA (from a game by Zachtronics)

The rest of this post is just a collection of my notes from trying out these languages.

XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations)

• I've probably written more XSLT than the vast majority of people, because I naively thought that HTML would be permanently recast into XML and XSLT would become the standard template language (that... didn't happen)
• Browsers still support XSLT, apparently!
• XPath is my favorite query language that many (most?) people don't seem to know about

COBOL

• First time using a column-oriented language!
• It's not clear to me when periods (.) are required and when they break things
• GNU COBOL errors don't have enough information for me to understand them
• My solution takes forever to run in COBOL, as compared to JavaScript--not sure why
• Forgetting an END-IF just completely changed the meaning of my program, but didn't produce and errors or warnings
• So, so verbose
• Lots of reserved words
• I dislike the combination of natural language syntax (ADD 1 TO N.) and things like 77 TOTAL PIC S9(15) COMP VALUE ZERO.

Perl

• Kept getting tripped up by scalar vs. array contexts (even with prior experience)
• I don't recall the details, but there was a case where I ended up needing parentheses when I thought brackets would be correct
• "Here docs" are great!
• I dislike the anonymous function syntax, but I'm glad anonymous functions are supported

WebGPU Shading Language

• Crashed my GPU several times while running code
• Lots of JavaScript required to setup computation and read back results
• The problem I attempted wasn't a good fit for parallel computation
• A different parallel-friendly problem I attempted required 64-bit arithmetic which apparently isn't supported in WGSL

AWK

• Order of for ... in loop is unspecified
• Arrays of arrays are not officially supported
• Relies on mutation in gsub() -- I think I'd prefer a functional version of AWK

WebAssembly (Text Format)

• Interesting syntax: it uses s-expressions, but you can also just write lines of assembly too
• I would have preferred labels instead of BLOCK and LOOP
• Resulting binary was tiny! Just 163 bytes!

Scratch

• I would have enjoyed this as a kid

Commodore BASIC

• All arithmetic is apparently floating point -- is it done in software? Because it's surprisingly slow
• Line numbers are annoying to deal with, but in the proper historical context they make sense because you entered one line at a time -- today, we're spoiled with text editors

Verilog

• The 8bitworkshop Verilog IDE is amazing

XOD

• Laying out all the components using my mouse was painfully tedious, but it resulted in a nice diagram that makes it clear how the solution works

EXA

• Exapunks is a great game
• You can use the T register for temporary storage
• You can use files for even more storage
• I still haven't found a great way to route messages between EXAs, other than only having 2 EXAs in a room
• I made a tool for dumping TEC Redshift discs into a text format (wait, that was in JavaScript--I used 12 languages this week!)