Caterpillar

I'm working towards a first milestone that would make Caterpillar at least minimally usable for simple games. And I'm spending more of that time on foundational work than I expected, as opposed to new features that would be relevant to users. I guess the milestone is going to be less rickety than I expected it to be, but I worry that it's also going to take longer.

And I worry that I'm jumping into this foundational work too quickly. That I don't see easier approaches, which could provide user-visible benefit faster. I want developers to work with Caterpillar as soon as possible, so its continued development can be informed by actual use.

But that foundational work is not useless. The game used to run very slowly on my laptop, which made performance a priority for the milestone. I made some changes to the guts of the language, which I expected to improve performance. But that wasn't the focus yet. Now the game runs fine. I expected that to be one of the more difficult tasks before the milestone, and it got done by accident.