I don’t code professionally, but I’ve been a programming dilettante since I was like eight years old #nerdalert

BASIC, 6502 assembly, Logo, Pascal. A little C. (Very little C). Lots and lots of Perl. Then Ruby. I suppose it’s the programming language I’ve stuck with the longest out of all of them, really.

But one of the biggest problems with interpreted languages in a world where Moore’s Law is starting to peter out¹ is that it’s always going to be slow(er).

Now I’m not really sure that switching to a static-site blog generator written in a compiled language is necessarily going to cut down on my build times, but I’ve been looking.

(As an aside, apparently Jekyll works with JRuby now but I haven’t been able to successfully build JRuby.)

Which leads me to a list of languages with Ruby-like syntax:

• Crystal
• Reia
• Mirah

On the etymology of peter out:

1846 US miners’ slang, from 1812 peter ‎(“to become exhausted”). Various speculative etymologies have been suggested, either from St. Peter (from sense of “rock”), French péter ‎(“to fart”), or saltpeter (ingredient in gunpowder, hence used in mining)