My latest fun project is a BASIC interpreter called Acidica. Classic BASIC is an old-school language first developed in 1964 that saw an explosion of implementations on microcomputers in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s much more primitive than the Visual Basic that you might be familiar with.

A simple BASIC program:

10 INPUT "What is your name"; U$
20 PRINT "Hello "; U$
30 INPUT "How many stars do you want"; N
40 S$ = ""
50 FOR I = 1 TO N
60 S$ = S$ + "*"
70 NEXT I
80 PRINT S$
90 INPUT "Do you want more stars"; A$
100 IF LEN(A$) = 0 THEN 90
110 A$ = LEFT$(A$, 1)
120 IF A$ = "Y" OR A$ = "y" THEN 30
130 PRINT "Goodbye ";U$
140 END

Run it, and you get this:

What is your name? Ned
Hello Ned
How many stars do you want? 10
**********
Do you want more stars? y
How many stars do you want? 20
********************
Do you want more stars? n
Goodbye Ned

The wide variety of BASIC flavors meant I first had to decide what to implement. I found Vintage BASIC and used its spec, both because it is concisely described, and because it has an implementation I could run to double-check behavior when I had questions. The site also has a collection of runnable games from Creative Computing magazine, which I remember fondly.

This was a perfect vacation-week project. It has no real-world consequences. It had some interesting problems to puzzle through. It was testable. It satisfied some nostalgia for my earlier computing days. It was bounded enough to be “done”.

In those ways, it’s very similar to a vacation project of mine from four years ago: Stilted, an implementation of PostScript.

Acidica is not useful for writing new programs, only because BASIC itself is so difficult. There is no scoping beyond single-line functions, variables names can be as long as you want but only the first two letters and first digit are significant. Keywords are recognized anywhere, so FACTOR can’t be variable name because it has TO in the middle. The only control structures are FOR, IF, and GOTO. It’s something of a testament to human persistence that programs like three-dimensional tic-tac-toe can be written in it.

As a side project, I could choose my development style: no real type checking (partly because BASIC’s values would be awkward to squeeze into static typing), and very few docstrings. There are lots of tests, but only integration tests: every test is a BASIC program to run, with a check for the correct output and/or the expected error.

To be honest, the “only integration tests” approach was kind of a pain, but I stuck with it and resisted the temptation to add unit tests along the way.

Another choice I made: no AI. I like writing programs. I get a deeper sense of the thing I am building when I have my fingers in the clay. Since there was no deadline, or even any reason to ever finish the project, I could take my time and not be rushed.

But I like the result. I enjoyed the time I spent working on it. I liked being able to stop and devote pure thinking time while doing other things when I got to the next hurdle. The next steps here might be to use this project as a test bed for some development ideas. Or maybe add a BASIC-to-Python transpiler. Or maybe it’s done.

My mother is 86, and she is declining. Things that used to be easy for her now seem completely foreign. She was a programmer, writing software before I could read, so it is very strange to see her like this.

She no longer uses a computer. If I mention some photos I found online, she asks if there’s any way she can see them, as if she has never used the internet. This is a new reality for me, but is easier than a year or two ago when she still tried to be constantly online. As things got more confusing for her, she struggled and complained “the computer is haunted.” Now she doesn’t have the computer as a source of friction, but also not as a center of activity.

In many ways, she is following a similar path to her own mother, my Grandma O. Like her, my mom is accepting the changes in her relationship to the world. She is able to laugh at it a bit. But it will still be difficult, especially because we know it is a progression that is not going to get better and will very likely get worse.

The new her is very different from the original her. She was not timid. She came out as gay in the mid ‘70s and ran a feminist bookstore. She worked as a programmer. She got a PhD in computational linguistics just because she was interested in the topic. These were the things I was used to hearing about from her. She never lacked for enthusiasms, projects and accomplishments.

She was always energetic and feisty, ready to engage in debate. This picture does a good job capturing the spirit of many of our interactions in the past:

Now she is mild and somewhat resigned. She says things like, “I don’t think much anymore.” I know there are other ways this could go. Some people get very angry as their abilities fade. In that sense, this is a good trajectory, but I am still sad to see her shrink.

Last week we had a family gathering at my sister’s house, the usual location for these big events. My mom has been there many times. But now she didn’t recognize it. I sat with my mom and sister over lunch. They were discussing the dining room we were in. It wasn’t familiar to my mom. She wasn’t upset about it, just looked around and said, “no, I don’t remember this.”

My mom was enjoying her salad, but eating it with her hands. I pointed to the fork on her plate and asked, “You don’t like the fork?” She looked at it as if it was some unimportant detail of the tablecloth, and kept eating with her hands. She wasn’t bothered, just calmly proceeded in her way.

At the end of the party, my mom and her wife Fumiko were getting ready to go. Fumiko had scheduled a ride-share car, so we went out to the street to wait for it. We brought out a chair for my mom to sit. The time for the car came and went, but no car arrived. There were five of us out there: me, my sister and brother, my mother and Fumiko. My brother and Fumiko were trying to figure out where the car was. They were looking through the app for information. They re-read the email confirming the scheduled ride. Should we keep waiting? We could request a new ride. Would we be charged for the missed scheduled ride? It was a whole thing, lots of discussion and questions.

In the middle of this, without warning, my mom tried unsteadily to get up from her chair. Two of us quickly intercepted her. The uneven pavement seemed particularly treacherous for her. We supported her arms to keep her steady.

“Mom, where are you trying to go?”

“I want a place of certainty. This place seems very uncertain.”

She was right: out there on the sidewalk we were all uncertain. But I have to wonder if she was also talking about her larger experience in a world that is less and less understandable for her.

In the back of my mind, I wonder what my own future holds. But that is decades away, and my mother’s situation is now. I don’t know what her next steps down will be like. She has already changed a great deal in the last year.

I think we would all like a place of certainty. I know I would, but I also know I am not going to get it soon.

I saw this dodecahedron with an Islamic-inspired pattern designed by Taj Ragoo. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to make one. I studied the pattern, wrote some Python, and made myself a PDF. I cut it out, folded it, glued it together, and now I have one of my own:

I love that this elegantly combines two pure geometric forms: the Platonic dodecahedron (12 uniform pentagons), and an Islamic pattern using five-pointed stars.

Looking closely, details emerge:

Each face has ten small stars in a ring. I’ve lightened them a bit in the front face here. At the center of each face is a ten-pointed star (highlighted in red), made of two overlaid five-pointed stars.

The real genius of the pattern is at the corners. I’ve highlighted one in blue. It’s a star made of the same parts as the central ten-pointed star, but there are only nine points. It works because three pentagons lying flat touching at a point occupy 324 degrees, leaving a 36-degree gap.

When the dodecahedron is folded together, the gap is closed. 36 degrees is exactly one-tenth of a complete 360-degree circle, so exactly one point of the ten-pointed star is missing, leaving a perfect nine-pointed star using the same shapes, spread over the corners of three pentagons. Beautiful!

If this appeals to you, follow Taj on Instagram: he’s got more Platonic/Islamic mashups to enjoy. The paper versions are just prototypes of the final versions he makes in wood.

Of course, you can get my PDF and make one for yourself:

The Python code to draw the net isn’t great: it has no real parallels to the structure of each face. It’s a lot of math and line drawing to get things in the right places. My ideal would be to have a toolset that used a tile-placing abstraction, to be able to do more interesting designs. Some day.

It was a joy to work on this though. It was a slow process of studying the original, working out the math, then mulling over coding approaches. The code was developed in small steps over weeks. Then printing initial versions, marking them up, working out the tab structure. Some copies were colored to understand how the lines flowed across the whole dodecahedron. It was good to be working in both the mental and physical worlds:

Update: it looks like the design was originally by Dana Awartani: Dodecahedron Within an Icosahedron.

Perhaps because 64 is a power of two, and a square and a cube, but also for other reasons, it pops up in lots of places. Here are some of the things I’ve associated it with over the years:

¶ Crayola 64-crayon box: as a kid, this box seemed like the ultimate luxury, the Rolls-Royce of crayons. So many colors, and the box had a built-in sharpener. Advanced technology!

¶ A chess board has 64 squares, and is used as the setting for the age-old question about doubling: would you rather have one billion dollars, or a penny on the first square, then double the number on each next square? It’s an eye-opening demonstration of exponential growth and how big numbers can get. Take the chess board: you’ll have 184 million times more money!

¶ I grew up in New York City too late to visit the 1964 World’s Fair, but its aura hung over the city. I was always fascinated by it, and still am. It epitomized the early 60’s optimism about the future. This Love of Theme Parks video does a good job capturing the Fair’s original spirit and the current state of the location, and explains the important part Walt Disney played in the whole thing.

¶ As a power of 2, it appears in many tech things: Nintendo 64, Commodore 64, base-64 encoding, 64-bit integers, 64-bit computing in general, and so on and so on.

¶ The number famously appears in the Beatles’ song When I’m Sixty-Four. A surprising fact about the song is that it’s one of the first Paul McCartney ever wrote, when he was about 14 years old. It’s an old-fashioned tune because he wasn’t aware of rock and roll yet, or maybe it hadn’t even happened yet. It’s thought they put the song on Sgt Pepper because Paul’s father was turning 64 that year.

There are many historical artifacts and monuments in Boston. This is one of my favorites:

It’s in the center of the Granary Burying Ground, the third-oldest cemetery in Boston. Casual tourists will assume the monument marks Ben Franklin’s grave, but they are wrong: it is for his parents.

Ben Franklin wrote an inscription for his parents’ grave. The marker deteriorated and in 1827 was replaced with this large obelisk and a new plaque.

The plaque is far from the walkway and hard to read even up close:

It reads:

JOSIAH FRANKLIN AND ABIAH HIS WIFE
lie here interred.

They lived lovingly together in wedlock fifty five years. And without an estate, or any gainful employment, by constant labor and honest industry, maintained a large family comfortably, and brought up thirteen children and seven grandchildren respectably. From this instance, reader, be encouraged to diligence in thy calling, and distrust not providence. He was a pious and prudent man; she a discreet and virtuous woman.

THEIR YOUNGEST SON,
in filial regard to their memory places this stone.
J.F. Born 1655 __ Died 1744, Æ. 89.
A.F. ___ 1667 _______ 1752, __ 85.

The original inscription having been nearly obliterated
A number of citizens erected this monument, as a mark of respect for the
ILLUSTRIOUS AUTHOR,
MDCCCXXVII

I love that neither the original inscription nor the re-dedication mentions Ben Franklin by name. He wanted the focus to be on his parents, and the citizens of 1827 understood and kept their words in his style. He writes lovingly about his parents and their lifestyle, and keeps us thinking about them, not him.

I also like the word “reader” in there. Even when writing tombstones, Ben couldn’t resist his Poor Richard’s Almanac pedagogical style.

A few blocks from the cemetery is a plaque on Court St marking the location of James Franklin’s printing shop where Ben was an apprentice:

You can see in the picture there’s a one-block-long narrow dingy alleyway typical of downtown areas. It’s used for vans and dumpsters. I guess because it’s the location of the Franklin printing shop, this unremarkable and depressing passage is named “Franklin Avenue”. I would have expected something grander based on the name.

Maybe Ben wouldn’t have wanted something grander?

This is the mascot for Boston Python. It’s called Snake Way for Ducklings:

My son Ben drew it, which makes me very happy. He also drew Sleepy Snake. Wearing this image on a shirt around PyCon, I had to explain it a number of times. People in Boston understand it almost immediately, but others need more background.

In 1941, Robert McCloskey wrote a children’s book called Make Way for Ducklings. It’s a classic, selling millions of copies and never going out of print. We read it to our own children growing up many times.

The book is the story of Mrs. Mallard making her way through Boston guiding her eight ducklings (Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Oack, Pack, and Quack) to a pond in Boston’s Public Garden. It has charming pencil illustrations:

The book led to a sculpture in the Public Garden near the actual pond:

The sculpture is sized and placed for kids to play on, and is widely known and beloved in Boston. The ducks are dressed in costumes for all kinds of occasions: holidays, sports events, even Star Wars day. On Mother’s Day, there’s a duckling parade: families bring their children dressed as ducklings. In Boston, the ducklings are a big deal.

And it’s not just fiction.

So it seemed natural to Ben to riff on the ducklings for Boston Python. One observer thought a snake eating the ducklings seemed kind of dark, but you can see the ducklings are still quacking, so they are fine!

BTW, Boston also has Duck Boat tours, but that’s completely different.