Every cloud has a silver lining apparently.
Certainly, the demise of (or failure to materialise in the first place) of my Dublin job was a blow at the time, but I can take a couple of positives out of it.
Most immediately, it meant I ended up at SCEE, where I am having a great time.
Secondly, it allows me to approach my authoring tools project in a completely different way.
I haven’t given up - far from it - but it’s a spare time only project now (given the amount of spare time I usually have, that means it could easily take ten years). Without time pressures, or anyone else’s agenda, I can do it the way I really want to. Primarily, this means doing it in Dylan.
In fact, I’ve come to the decision that all code that I write in my spare time will now be in Dylan (or Dylan related). That’s quite a bold statement at this stage, and I may live to regret it! Dylan can do anything that any other language can do, but the tools are limited, and a lot of the spare-time coding I do tends to be writing hacks and plugins for other systems, such as Drupal.
Switching to Dylan for everything means I’m going to have to move back ten steps for every one step forward. Instead of writing a new plugin for Drupal, I will first have to write a new Drupal in Dylan :)
At this point you’re probably thinking that I’ve totally lost my marbles. That may be true, but from my point of view there are lots of compelling reasons to go down that route: