Hi everybody!
Long time no see.
I was always meaning to get back to Dialog development after a short break, but somehow I kept getting caught up in other projects. And I kept meaning to get back to it, and time kept passing… you know the feeling, I’m sure. I’ve also been feeling increasingly bad about letting the community down.
But I’ve just read through this thread (thanks for the nudge, Ben Kirwin!) and I’m very happy to see that people have taken action where I’ve just been postponing. I get good vibes from the discussion, and I think you’re on the right track. Some of you are even talking about trying to keep it in the spirit of my original vision, which I appreciate a lot on a personal level.
While I still care a lot about Dialog, I can no longer ignore the fact that it’s best for the project if I hand over the day-to-day feature development and maintenance to the community. You have my blessing to keep working on it, and to keep the Dialog name if and while it seems appropriate; if you feel that the project is drifting very far from the original spirit of the language, a fork and rename might be called for. I can weigh in on that decision if it ever becomes an issue. But I’m also curious to see how the language will evolve under the guidance of other creative minds.
If for some reason this community effort breaks down into conflicts and bickering, I’d like to think I have the moral right to step in and arbitrate. But the project is open source, so you can actually already do as you please. =)
Regarding versioning, I ask that major version 0 remains my personal release branch, in case I want to build upon my own codebase. You can hop over to a fresh start with 1a. Increment the letter with language changes, and ask me before going to 2.
The Dialog Manual is generated from a custom source format, so I would advise against editing the HTML directly. I should probably release the source for it, but I don’t want to commit to doing it soon; I fear I’ll procrastinate again and hold you back. Perhaps an addendum is the way to go in the meantime.
I have test cases, but some of them are based on code snippets that people have sent me in private, and I can’t redistribute those. So I would have to sort through the test cases manually. Again, I hesitate to promise anything because it would only get procrastinated. Consider building a new set of test cases, and I can integrate mine with yours later.
I’ve also made some local unreleased optimizations to the compiler, but those should be possible to integrate at a later point.
Thanks for being such a wonderful community! I feel good about entrusting Dialog in your care.
Now back to lurking (and turning old computers into musical instruments)!
Best regards,
Linus