work continues

I'm working on a music sequencer, and this is a development blog for it.

As I work, I find myself taking notes to myself.  Usually they're just fragmentary bits planning for some feature or bug fix, but sometimes I write more, and it's occurred to me that maybe sometime in the future it will be interesting to have a more organized record of my thought process.  And rather than it going in a bunch of fragmentary files in some directory I'll lose track of, maybe I can put it on the web.  So this is mostly a record for myself, but maybe someone else will find it interesting too.

I've been thinking about the need for a new music composition program and how I could do it ever since highschool, so that's about 15 years now.  I went through some more organized planning in college but wasn't confident enough in my programming skill to know where to start.  After that I got wrapped up in performance and haven't seriously written much music for a long time.  Around 6 years ago I was back in the US and didn't have a job and thought it was a good time to start on a project, so I spent about a month and got most of the UI up---the UI is very simple so that's not saying much.  Then I got a job at Google and got distracted for a long time (though I do remember I discussed some parts of it in the interviews).  Then, about 3 years ago I got serious about working on it again, rewrote the UI stuff and got started on the rest.

So the first darcs checkin is Jan 2008.  I thought it might take a few years, but it's been three so far and will probably be a while yet.  In the meanwhile, I've learned another language, lived in another country, and gotten married.  This is by far the largest project I have ever attempted.  I'm wary of the endless developing and never completing trap, but it really has turned out to be much more complicated than I thought.  Time will tell.

I'd like to think I've learned a lot, about application design (it's also the first GUI-owning program I've written), about dealing with larger programs, and about haskell, which is the main implementation language.  But it's hard to judge about these things.  All I can say now is that I've done things that I hadn't previously done, but not whether I could do them quicker or better than I might have previously, or even if I did them particularly well in the first place.  Maybe if I keeping notes will help with the long term perspective.

Here's the current stats on line count, as measured by wc:

11-07-10
   39775 *.hs     268 files
    2381 *.h      34 files
    5589 *.cc      28 files
     496 *.py       7 files
   48241 total     337


Oh, and the blog title is a bit of a pun.  "Karya" means "work" and can also mean work in the sense of a musical composition, so it seemed an appropriate name for the sequencer.