minimicro-editor-themes VS minimicro-sysdisk

Last weekend I participated in Micro Jam 013, which had a theme of "Lava" and a prerequisite of "Time is Limited". As I'm a sponsor of that jam, I wasn't eligible for any prizes, but I wanted to enter anyway, both for fun and to demonstrate what can be done with MiniScript and Mini Micro.

“Coding joyfully” couldn’t be a better description of the goals of MiniScript and Mini Micro as well. MiniScript is a relatively new language, created in 2017 to provide a clean, simple, powerful, and fun language for computer programming. It’s small enough that the language core can be described in a single page. But with functions as first-class objects, support for object-oriented programming, and sophisticated handling of lists and maps, it’s powerful enough for real work.

I recently discovered a C++ library (circle) that simplifies writing C++ programs to run on the Raspberry Pi, directly "on the metal" — without any operating system. I've had a Raspberry Pi 400 on my side table for a couple years now, running the standard Linux distribution, but not getting much use. What I really wanted was an experience like the classic home computers of the 80s: turn it on, and within seconds you are at a friendly blinking cursor, waiting for you to type some BASIC (or in our case, MiniScript) code.

Since its introduction in 2017, MiniScript's community has been steadily growing. And a delightful community it is — it spans the gamut from brand-new, never-coded-before beginners to experienced software engineers.

[LANGUAGE: MiniScript]

I am sponsoring a private leaderboard/contest for people tackling AoC 2023 using MiniScript, a new(ish), simple, clean programming language. Join us! No previous experience in MiniScript is needed; check out the 1-page Quick Reference and you will quickly see what the language is like.

is MiniScript a dialect of BASIC

We've started a community collection of themes for the Mini Micro code editor at https://github.com/JoeStrout/minimicro-editor-themes. The README file there explains how to browse and install the themes therein, either temporarily, or more permanently by loading them in your startup script.

He's currently divided his work into two projects on GitHub: MiniScript.TS is the language core, while MiniScript-NodeJS adds Node.js support and a script-runner. The latter includes support for print and input, the import command, and a subset of the Mini Micro /sys disk.

This might be of interest if you already know BASIC, and want to quickly bang out a game or utility. MiniBASIC provides a good set of high-resolution drawing commands, suitable for making plots, graphs, and diagrams. It also has access to all the data on the built-in /sys disk, including stock images, sounds, and a complete English word list! And, being completely cross-platform, Mini Micro (and so MiniBASIC) runs identically on any desktop computer (and soon mobile devices, too). So if BASIC is already in your wheelhouse, MiniBASIC offers a great way to take advantage of these Mini Micro features.

This uses a couple of tricks which you could glean from the startup.ms file on the system disk (/sys/startup.ms):

So as usual, I come away with a realization for something that really ought to exist in MiniScript: an efficient sort algorithm that takes a comparison function as an argument. I'll code this up soon, and who knows, it might even find its way into a future version of /sys/lib/listUtil.

One lesson learned is that I should always validate my function inputs. Had my findPath function simply checked that it was being passed two 2-element lists, I would have caught my error right away and fared much better. Grabbing code from somewhere else is no excuse; the first thing I should have done is examined the parameters, and added a quick qa.assert to me sure I call it correctly.

Once again, my starter program did me no good; nor did I need any of the stuff I've been gathering in my custom aoc module, or even the standard /sys/lib modules. The solution was plain, unadorned MiniScript. ❤️

My code for this one came out considerably longer than in previous days, despite havng a separate (prepared ahead of time) aoc module and all the other modules in Mini Micro's /sys/lib folder to lean on. So I'll present it in sections.