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My last mission (paid day job) involved writing a scripting engine (for a testing framework for programmable logic controllers). I'm no expert in language implementation, and it took much, much more time than expected (oops).

My first hello world involved handling arbitrary primitives. This one just printed "Hello, world!\n" without any parameter. Took me 2 months I believe.

My second hello world came a couple weeks (days?) after that. I had string literals, and a `print` primitive that could print any string. Yahoo!

I had to tackle choice and iteration at some point. They were completed 4 months into the project. Finally, user defined functions. I completed them 1 week before we shipped…

Cool, I now have 3 days to implement 2 critical features! (filtering with user-defined predicates, and non-blocking wait). Good thing I could do anything, now that I had user-defined functions.




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