This is part five of a series celebrating the passing of BOOL, the “ship in a bottle” computer language I’ve been tinkering with for three decades. It’s a design dream, and I’ve decided to wake up.

Last time I talked about how BOOL handles data and why that was such an issue. This time I’ll ramble on about some of the other snarls that ultimately made things more complicated than I wanted. Simplicity and elegance were key design goals. I intended the run-time environment, especially, to be utterly straightforward.

Unfortunately, the behavioral design goals — the way BOOL should to act at run-time — ended up in direct conflict with that.

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This is part four of a series commemorating BOOL, a computer language I started designing somewhere around 1990. After 30 years of sporadic progress I finally gave up. There were so many contradictions and (for lack of a better word) “epicycles” in the design goals that it just wasn’t viable.

So I’m mourning the passing of an idea that’s shared my headspace for three decades. Previously I’ve introduced BOOL and provided a tour of its basic aspects. Now I have to start talking about why it failed.

It has a lot to do with data, but that wasn’t the only issue.

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This is part three of a series mourning the death of a computer language I birthed around 1990. Now it’s turning 30, and I’ve decided it’s too old for this sort of thing. I’ve retired and now I’m retiring it (in the “sleeps with fishes” permanent retirement sense). These posts are part of a retirement party. BOOL might not be here to celebrate, but I’ll raise glasses in its honor.

First I introduced BOOL, a deliberate grotesquery, an exercise in “and now for something completely different!” Then I illustrated basic procedural programming in BOOL. This time I’ll get into the object-oriented side.

This aspect of BOOL is one of several that changed repeatedly over the years.

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This is part two of a series commemorating a computer language I started designing somewhere around 1990. After 30 years of tinkering I’ve finally accepted that it’s just not meant to be, and I’m letting it go. These posts are part of that letting go process.

Last time I introduced BOOL, said a bit about about what motivated it, and started laying out what made it a language only a parent could love. Later I’ll explain why things didn’t work out, but for now I’d like to tell you about what BOOL was supposed to be:

A glorious deliberate useless Frankenstein’s Monster (insert mad laughter).

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Somewhere around 1990 I started designing a programming language I named BOOL (Beginner’s Object-Oriented Language). It was always a personal “ship in a bottle” project — something more for aesthetic expression than utility. Like that guy constantly working on an old car in his garage, I’ve dabbled with it ever since.

I’ve decided to, at long last, take BOOL off life support and let it die (another dead dream). But enough of dreams. I’m tired of the weight of dreams; time to shed a pointless burden. I’ve carried it for 30 years, and I think it’s time to chalk this one up to experience.

So this is a eulogy and a memorial.

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