The latest: We’re expecting! The due date is the middle of February. First ultrasound looks good. Robin’s pretty sick a lot of the time, but there’s only a month left in the first trimester, and we’re hoping the nausea settles down after the first trimester like it did with Alan. She’s a lot sicker this time, and thinks that maybe that means we have a girl. Hard to say, but we’ll find out!
Alan keeps growing. He’s at the just-shy-of-terrible-twos now and exerting his independence by means of tantrum. (Lord help you if you want to change his diaper, or if you leave the room without his permission.) We took him to the zoo for the first time last weekend, and he was far more interested in the carousel than the animals. Ah, well. He recently learned that he can stack his alphabet blocks into towers, which has been highly entertaining to watch. Still no speech yet except for going “nyaah” when he sees a cat (it’s his “meow”), but with any luck, he’ll at least figure out “Mommy” and “Daddy” soon. He certainly knows what we’re saying, and nods (and waves his arms) and shakes his head (and waves his arms) to indicate “yes” and “no.”
What’s new in Smile-land? Back in April, I started rewriting the interpreter in C. It was never going to be fast enough in C#, and I always knew a C or C++ port would be necessary. I rejected C++ after a few attempts (more thoughts on that below). So far — well, I have a garbage collector and a working String object and a bunch of unit tests and that’s about it for the last three months. I only get an hour here or there at best to work on it. But Ben recently challenged me to have a minimally-usable interpreter by Christmas, and that’s put a little more fire under my butt to do something about it.
On C++
I rejected C++ because C++ is C++.
