Embed Notice

My first attempt at what would become #GRASP was in September 2016, when I was working on a structure editor running in the SLAYER framework that I was developing at the time. It wasn't called GRASP yet, though - I called it "Butterfly", because of the XKCD strip about "real programmers", but I didn't get very far.

SLAYER was based on Guile, and I ended up implementing something akin to Racket's Big Bang (which I didn't know about at that time), and I have spent considerable effort to find a way to represent stuff in Scheme in a nice way (I developed a library for working with lists of interspersed keywords and values, but I was never happy about that).

I think I may have been on a trajectory to build something similar to @disconcision 's Fructure, but I broke my laptop, and it took me a while to recover the latest changes from the disk (which I think eventually happened in 2018; until then, I was working on a small Intel Atom-based netbook that I borrowed from a friend, and on which I wrote "A Pamphlet Against R").

Then I started to look for a nice way of putting rectangles into other rectangles, which took the form of "The Draggable Rectangle Challenge" that I published on Quora (I was a Quora addict at that time)

https://eidolon-language.quora.com/Draggable-rectangle-challenge-part-I-the-introduction

I wrote a highly idiosyncratic solution in Racket, which nevertheless had its charm, but it ran terribly slowly on my friend's Raspberry Pi, and I haven't figured out any way to run it on Android.

The editor window title was "GRASP LIMB", where "GRASP" stands - of course - for GRAphical Scheme Programming, and "LIMB" is meant to be a pun on LISP's backronym "Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses"; "LIMB" was meant to stand for "Lots of Intriguing Movable Boxes".

I started figuring out a way to build Android applications - I had to buy additional 2GB of RAM to my laptop to make Android Studio to run, and when (after breaking another laptop) I finally found a way to build Android apps in Termux, without Android Studio, it turned out to be a huge productivity booster to me - I could finally do programming in places where I wouldn't be able to use the laptop, and this setup prompted some of the design of GRASP.

I made the first version on/for the phone in the spring of 2020, mainly on the toilet (and it shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmZ39IfElzg), and in 2021 I wrote what I thought would be the "final version" - but in both cases, the development eventually stalled.