The vulgus in Latin were the common folks, the non elite, hence referring to cussing ass “vulgarity,” as in “we nobles do not talk that way, that is how the common folk talk!”. And if I do my job right most professional programmers should be offended by the result? But that's a really awful thing to have as your north star.

The basic idea is that computation should be something that does not require a degree and work experience and other markers of professionalism... Computation is just an intellectual amplifier. I was shocked some 5 to 10 years ago to have gone to a guy’s “Excel Tips” meeting at the advertising firm I worked for—all the other programmers skipped—and saw a bunch of non-technical folks excitedly sitting down to learn what I rapidly realized was... programming! They were volunteering to run and sit at a programming class!!

But Excel is a shitty language, but it is also vulgar. When you go to learn it, there is no compiler step, the interpreter step is a repl of sorts, everything is being automatically printf-debugged for you by default, and helpful colorful boxes point to the data dependencies of the cell you're working on while you're working on it.

But it's also like, why isn't everything like that. If I give you a UI that is written this way, you should expect to be able to long press on a button and see the button disassemble before your very eyes, you can track the pipeline for its clicks, and if that button doesn't do what you want it to do, you just change what it does. Everybody on this planet should be able to do that, it shouldn't require ivy league ivory tower education bullshit.

So I have these prototype languages that are fundamentally graphical, and kind of amount to a sort of XSLT (of all things!) being compiled to WASM?. A bit of inspiration from hypercard here and there. And it's weird because the decision to WASM is kind of its own shit decision? Like, I wanted the ability to just text you an app that I am working on and you can run it on your phone and feel safe that I am not stealing all your secrets, was why I started compiling to WASM. But as far as I can tell there is nothing I can do with WASM other than to define a function library, so the resulting language such as it is, is mostly a bunch of conventions operating on a WASM function library, and it gets really elaborate and complicated and I am 90% sure that you could just exploit the conventions in the state that it is right now, so like “why am I writing XSLT-to-WASM who the fuck cares” sometimes.

Nothing fully worth showing off right now though.