4 Feb 2019
Welcome to the new Wren development blog!
Around November 2018 on the Wren mailing list, munificent announced that a new maintainer is taking over the development and maintainence of the Wren language. The original post is here, with all the details.
In short, I’m (ruby0x1) taking over from Bob (munificent) as maintainer, but Bob is sticking around as a contributor!
One of the first things I felt Wren needed going forward is a consistent and centralized place to talk about the language. The existing design choices and goals, and especially the future and evolution of Wren are something a lot of people want to read about, in detail. Now we have a place to do exactly that!
The blog will be keeping in the spirit of Wren by remaining simple. Posts are just regular markdown files in the repository alongside the rest of the site, and are considered part of the documentation.
Since Wren as a project aims to help others learn, having the in depth thought processes, development details and technical intricacy be documented in the same place, over a timeline, is valuable.
First and foremost, I wanted to state explicitly that Wren is going to be changing but it is not going to become something else.
Wren attracted me as a language because of what it is, not because it isn’t {other language}. If I wanted to use {other language} I would have, but I chose Wren because I wanted what it was.
So, Wren is going to be changing in ways that align with it’s existing design intentions. Staying small, simple, learnable and hackable is all vital to what makes Wren valuable, and will remain.
We’re just as excited as you are to get to longer term changes and fun tweaks (we have lots of work done already in local projects like the debugger). There’s plenty of ideas we’ve tried since we’ve been using Wren full time the last 2.5+ years, and can’t wait to get started with bring those into the main branch (and optional modules). There’s a lot to do!
In the next blog I want to try talk a bit more about the short to medium term goals and roadmap (rather than mixing it here with the meta/hello world post). Be sure to keep an eye out for that one, as it has more juicy details on what we’re gonna get up to.
There are immediate term goals, though.
I think it’s important to reset the baseline before we shake things up too much. Think of it as a ramp up to gain momentum, rather than running into a china store with arms flailing.
Once we tag 0.2.0, we’ll be in a good place to move forward. And, everything up until now will have a well defined checkpoint preserved, if people want to refer to it.
Since the announcement and transition, I’ve been making my way through all the mailing list posts, issues and PRs in the backlog and reading all the way back to the early days.
I’ve also been talking to community members one on one and getting personal experiences and thoughts on Wren. Forming a full picture will help us since we’ll have an overview of what’s most relevant (and what isn’t) as time has passed, and gives us actionable things to do for the next milestone. I think it’s an important step.
We’ve also been investigating some of the PRs with the community to get those sorted out, since they’re in the way.
Lastly, I’ve already done a bit of clean up on the website and documentation theme, added a new logo, and of course added the blog.
Lastly, I wanted to say thanks to munificent, the community and all the contributors that have made Wren possible to this point. It’s a wonderful thing and I look forward to seeing where we take it, together.
I hope you’ll join us on the journey!