When I wrote this, back in the before times (when graduate school seemed more like the Elysian Fields than it did a ravine full of a pile of dead Sisyphus impersonators), I honestly thought it was a somewhat strained analogy. Bacterial genomes were, I knew, somewhat prone to self-stabilizing. That seemed sort of like the right thing to map onto a matrix, with the eigenvectors being forces that act on it. But there's no really snappy way to refer to, specifically, a matrix that is part of a system with a set of eigenvectors and eigenvalues, so I twisted the metaphor, slapped the nice eigenvector label on it, and sort of let it go, like the shower thought it was.

But now, having long-since fled the ravine and all its boulders, I'm not so sure I was wrong. […]

Consider:

const animals = ['ant', 'bison', 'camel', 'duck', 'elephant'];

console.log(animals);
delete animals[2];
console.log(animals);

console.log(animals.filter((x) => { return x !== undefined; }));

This produces the output:

> Array ["ant", "bison", "camel", "duck", "elephant"]
> Array ["ant", "bison", undefined, "duck", "elephant"]
> Array ["ant", "bison", "duck", "elephant"]

Sometimes you just need to iterate over a non-iterable collection and delete things as you go. Now you can clean up after and not feel bad about it.

This question has been asked quite a lot by newbies, and they are invariably told to just use Array.prototype.splice(), but that has the annoying habit of immediately re-indexing the array.

I should probably mention that using delete on Array elements is slightly undefined behaviour; at least one checker (JSlint) apparently dislikes it. But the MDN page for Array is almost weirdly glib about casually discussing implementation details, so we'll just say YMMV.

I've come to believe that my approach to constructed languages is a little different from most conlangers. It seems to me that most people first fall in love with the phonology or diachronics of a natural language (or a family of natural languages), and spend as much time as possible fixating on sounds: for the unadventurous, 'build-your-own-Romance-language' is an entire genre, and will probably be the only way they'll arrive at something that can be used to write more than a few words. Beyond that, xenophilia is an overriding obsession: for phonologies that aren't nearly identical to English, [ɕ] is more common than [ɹ]. Maybe this is all just an artefact of how linguistics is taught in the average university curriculum, but it's always struck me as odd that so many conlangers immediately make a bee-line for the parts of the art that are the least creative. (And if a conlang does make it past the first post and get into some vocabulary, there's a good chance it'll have triconsonantal verb roots, which have become, for lack of a better term, a meme.) To avoid drawing out this too much, my favourite topics are more in the areas of glyphs and words. I'd rather see a dictionary with a nice alphabet chart than a complete set of sound changes and grammar. (Although grammar is, I suppose, neutral ground. It's pretty cool too.)

Anyway. With that venting done, let's talk about your conscript and why it's probably garbage. […]

Creator of Lilitika and co-creator of Thet.

I started this site in late 2013 to give the conlanging and conworlding community a specially-tailored way to showcase projects. I don't do quite as much administrating any more, and sometimes I can be scarce because I have so many other big responsibilities, but I try to maintain and improve things whenever I can.

See my profile page elsewhere for more information about me.