Title: Too Much, Too Slow
Date: 20191223
Tags: me programming
========================================
Current mood: Ugh.
I took some time off between the weekend and Christmas. I had planned to get
some programming done on my Altair. Up until now, I've been writing everything
from scratch and hand assembling. I'm at the point where that is tedious, time
consuming, and error prone work. My next stop is to write an assembler.
Easy plan. There are several assemblers that I have documentation for and
having done my own assembling, I know what I need it to do.
Enter my personal demons. Perfection is the enemy of good. Scope creep is the
enemy of just making it work. There are challenges to writing an assembler that
I need to solve and I have several ideas for them. But do you think I could
just settle on one and write it? I've been working on this for a few weeks so
I'm in the thick of it. I still keep changing my mind about implementation
options and features.
I've got about a third of it written but I'm not quite settled on any of it. I
haven't tested anything I've written, either. I've started to (as part of yet
another project reboot) but keep making simple mistakes. I am making no
progress and it's been unfun.
Ultimately, I'm having trouble focusing on the project. It's a lot to bite off
for little gain. I don't want to write an assembler so much as just make it
easier to write other programs. And I can't (self imposed) benefit from easier
program writing to write this one.
It's a bigger program than I've written for the Altair so far, it's a lot to do,
and it's slow going. I need to break it down into smaller, standalone parts and
see them through to working completion. So...starting over again.
It is something I want to do and it is supposed to be fun. Just part of me
isn't up for it.
