Tobe Osakwe

What’s New – January 27th, 2020

As January winds down, I figured it would be a good time to continue my “What’s New” series. (I’ve actually posted one this month already, so this will also cover early February.)

What’s Dead (or rather, completed)

  • sumo – I spent the winter break finally completing a compiler. It’s a pretty unsurprising language, but there are no classes/inheritance, and instead, you have sum types. Work to complete pattern matching is underway, but the project is currently paused, and I’ll probably revisit again when I’m on a hobby kick again. I do consider it “finished,” although it’s not super-usable at this point. https://github.com/thosakwe/sumo-lang
  • ml-- – While on the aforementioned hobby kick, I wrote a specification (no compiler lol, not enough time) for a low-level, functional language called ML–. It looks like OCaml, but the main difference is that there’s no garbage collection. Instead, rw and ro types are introduced, which are a derivative of linear types (mentioned in one of the articles below), and statically express the notion of data ownership. I haven’t done any proofs yet, but logically, the language is guaranteed to prevent use-after-free, data races, null-pointer-errors, segmentation faults, and essentially all memory-related errors. I opted not to include dependent types – although on paper, they seem interesting, they make a language unnecessarily complex to understand.

What’s In Progress

My goal for the latter half of this month was to only work on these two projects, and that will continue into February. Most of my time will likely go into CTLG, as Reel is mostly done, and I also believe I can more quickly monetize CTLG.

  • Reel – hooray! It’s not dead, and I hope to launch the beta in the coming months.
  • CTLG – I started this back in December, and I’ve made great progress this month. The admin/for-artists panel is almost complete. The next steps are creating the user-facing Web widget, and a mobile app for listening on-the-go.
  • Elevator pitch:

The music industry pulls in over $20bn a year, yet artists only see about 12% of that. As an artist, especially if you sign to a big label and sell through Spotify, each play is only netting you a fraction of a penny. CTLG (pronounced catalogue) is here to change that, by letting you pocket a full 100% of all profits on your music. (How does it work?) Artists can sign up and get a piece of code they can embed on a personal website. This code is a widget that lets your fans browse, purchase, and listen to your music, all without even leaving your site. What’s more, we have a mobile app, too, so anyone who’s bought your records can listen on the go.

What I’ve Read/Watched

What I’ve Watched And Listened To

This is a new section, but I think it’s equally important – there’s a person behind the code! Here are some of my favorite songs this month. Also, I finished both Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket (😢).

  • Peta – Roddy Rich, Meek Mill
  • Mary Jane – Rick James
  • Mannequin Challenge – Young Thug, Juice WRLD (RIP)
  • Thief in the Night – Young Thug
  • Cartier Gucci Scarf – Young Thug
  • NC-17 – Travis Scott, 21 Savage
  • 5% TINT – Travis Scott
  • a lot – 21 Savage, J. Cole (congrats to these two on a Grammy!)

Conclusion

Writing conclusions is boring. See you next month!

R.I.P. Mamba

P.S. Rest In Peace, Kobe Bryant, Gianna Bryant, and all who perished on that fated helicopter flight. I spent the day creating a tribute song, and if you’d like to hear it, it’s on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/tobeomusic/number-24

Tobe Osakwe

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