One of the things that helps¹ my depression is having interesting projects to do. A long running one for me is bootstrapping a high level language with the maximum interactivity, rather than with some opaque binary blob.

The original inspiration came from the GNU Mes (Maxwell’s Equations for Software), but there are numerous other sources of inspiration, some I have probably forgotten.

Initially I started with a small stack based VM which uses printable ASCII characters as instructions, so could be typed, but quickly came across JONESFORTH, which at the same time is both a nice introduction to assembly programming, and an introduction to Forth, a language only slightly less minimal than my stack based printable ASCII interpreter, but is much more powerful.