Well, this is certainly overdue. It's the writeup for a challenge I authored for this year's UMass CTF, which ran from October 5th to October 12th. Yes, I'm late. But when you attend a university that tried very hard to squeeze the entire semester twelve weeks, you're going to deal with burnout and not nearly enough time to do things outside of your coursework. So I'm finally coming back to the challenge now that the semester's ended.
It's been over a year since I last wrote about contenders for the throne that C currently sits upon, so I'll spare you the prosy introduction and cut to the chase. I'd like to share some thoughts on my recent foray into a little programming language I came across while browsing lobste.rs some years ago: Myrddin, the pet project of Ori Bernstein. From the language specification, "Myrddin is designed to be a simple programming language. It is designed to provide the programmer with predictable behavior and a pragmatic set of semantics, providing the benefits of strong type checking, generics, type inference, and modern features with a high cost-benefit ratio. Myrddin is not a language designed to explore the forefront of type theory or compiler technology. Its focus is on being a practical, small, well defined, and easy to understand language for work that needs to be close to the hardware. Myrddin is influenced strongly by C and ML, with ideas from too many other places to name." The front page of the website specifically states that "[i]t aims to fit into a similar niche as C, but with fewer bullets in your feet." I see these descriptions and the cat-v-inspired stylesheets as a warning to those who don't appreciate a spartan attitude towards software development. Fortunately, I'm not one of those people.