M contents/articles/hex.md → contents/articles/hex.md

@@ -15,31 +15,31 @@ Right. That was meant to dissuade me to embark in endless quests for creating yet another (pointless?) little language that _probably_ doesn't really solve any practical purpose. I have a bunch of those lying around or even half-designed in my personal wiki, and of course [min](https://min-lang.org) has been my go-to personal project for many years, and I still enjoy tinkering with it.
 
 But...
 
-I still wanted to create a new language. The problem with min is that by emphasizing practicality more and more, it became more of a single-file, batteries included programming language that can be used to create web servers, make HTTPS requests, process XML files, ...things like that.
+I still wanted to create a new language. The problem with min is that by emphasizing practicality more and more, it became more of a single-file, batteries-included programming language that can be used to create web servers, make HTTPS requests, process XML files, ...things like that.
 
-The syntax also evolved quite a bit to support complex data types, it has sigils and other oddities (bang-postfixed auto-popping symbols, anyone?). And it is also not that small anymore. Well over 1MB on some platforms. It statically links OpenSSL for Heaven's sake.
+The syntax also evolved quite a bit to support complex data types, it has sigils, and other oddities (bang-postfixed auto-popping symbols, anyone?). And it is also not that small anymore. Well over 1MB on some platforms. It statically links OpenSSL for Heaven's sake.
 
-And it is written in Nim. Because I forgot how to program in C. Sometimes I wish I invested the same amount of time in re-learning C rather than picking a new slightly non-mainstream language to build my ecosystem with. But it's fine, these are not regrets, everything helps shaping up the future, in life.
+And it is written in Nim. Because I forgot how to program in C. Sometimes I wish I invested the same amount of time in re-learning C rather than having picked a new slightly non-mainstream language to build my ecosystem with. But it's fine, these are not regrets, everything helps shaping up the future, I suppose.
 
 ### Why _hex_?
 
-I wanted to create a language that was:
+I wanted to create a language that:
 
-- Really minimalist in syntax
-- Small in size
-- Cross-platform (compiling to WebAssembly and also [αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε](https://justine.lol/ape.html))
-- Was implemented in C (that was more of a personal thing than anything else, but C ain't going anywhere as a language, at least)
-- Concatenative (I am still fascinated by the concatenative programming paradigm)
-- Able to do basic operations on strings and numbers, and delegate everything else to external programs
-- Able to be used to create shell scripts, used as glue code, etc.
-- It had some quirks. Not many, but _some_ to make it interesting and fun to play with
-- Be easy to learn and useful to learn more about concatenative programming
+- had a really minimalist syntax
+- was small in size
+- was cross-platform (compiling to WebAssembly and also [αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε](https://justine.lol/ape.html))
+- was implemented in C (that was more of a personal thing than anything else, but C ain't going anywhere as a language, at least)
+- was concatenative (I am still fascinated by the concatenative programming paradigm)
+- was able to do basic operations on strings and numbers, and delegate everything else to external programs
+- was able to be used to create shell scripts, used as glue code, etc.
+- had some quirks. Not many, but _some_ to make it interesting and fun to play with
+- was easy to understand and useful to learn more about concatenative programming
 
-Then the name. It took me hours of thinking over... weeks to come up with a good name. I then settled with _hex_ because:
+Then the name. It took me weeks to come up with a good name. I then settled with _hex_ because:
 
 - It's short and memorable
-- It has not been used for another programming language yet (go try find 1-3 letter words that are not, you'd be surprised)
-- It has something magical about it (besides thinking about hexadecimal numbers, it also means _spell_ or a curse)
+- It has not really been used for a popular programming language yet (go try find 1-3 letter words that are not, you'd be surprised)
+- It has something magical about it (besides thinking about hexadecimal numbers, it also means _spell_ or curse)
 
 ### MVPL (Minimum Viable Programming Language)
 
@@ -47,27 +47,29 @@ Another page of my personal wiki aims at defining what constitutes a _minimum viable programming language_.
 
 Here's a list of things that I consider _mandatory_:
 
-v integers
-v strings
-v arrays 
-v exec external processes
-v variables
-v define functions 
-v flow control: conditionals, loops
-v error handling
-v file management
-v std io
+- integers
+- strings
+- arrays 
+- exec external processes
+- variables
+- define functions 
+- flow control: conditionals, loops
+- error handling
+- file management
+- std io
 
 ...and here's a list of things that are _nice to have_:
 
-? floats
-? objects
-? booleans
-? lexical scoping
-? serialization/deserialization
-? regex
-? networking
-? xml
-? json
+- floats
+- objects
+- booleans
+- lexical scoping
+- serialization/deserialization
+- regex
+- networking
+- xml
+- json
+
+I hope that _lexical scoping_ in the _nice to have_ made you chuckle. I know it would be bad, but _technically_ you wouldn't really need lexical scoping.