Just recently I presented a short talk on time-travelling debuggers at Code BEAM Stockholm, so I thought it would be interesting to go into some of the things happening behind the scenes here.

Last time I wrote about my general approach to writing talks, so this time I’ll just discuss the general design ideas that went on this one in particular.

It was a bit of a wild ride, to be honest, and I panicked more than usual; but such is life. It was still a fun experience in the end :’)

The art community has some interesting dynamics where people try to re-interpret existing works with their own aesthetics and understanding of it. Of course, part of this is that art allows this re-interpretation to begin with; there are no right or wrong answers in art.

I often go around saying that programming and mathematics can be seen as art forms, too, but it just struck me that I don’t know anything like this in the programming scene, at least (and I’m not familiar enough with the mathematics scene to comment on that).

Which then led to the question: “What would a ‘Coding Cover’ (for lack of a better name) look like?”

Version 0.14 is the newest experimental release for Crochet. It fixes some of the most glaring semantic issues in the language, and adds quite a few new packages, with a particular focus on debugging. The changelog summarises all of these.

You can install it from npm as usual:

$ npm install -g @qteatime/crochet@experimental

Since these are experimental pre-releases, do note that there will be many issues (including security issues!) in it. Treat it as a toy, not a finished programming system.

Anyway, let’s talk about the stuff that is included in this version!