Show HN: Xoscript
xoscript.com53 points by gabordemooij 20 hours ago
53 points by gabordemooij 20 hours ago
The None object represents emptiness, or better still, the absence of information. On occasion, you will receive this object as an answer to a message, in case of the result being nothing. The most essential question you could ask the None object is: None?. The answer will always read True.
Wow, you weren't kidding
> In Xoscript, the meaning of True and False is not fixed. In fact, a Xoscript program gets pretty shaken up over a statement like this: [True := False.] The result of such actions is undefined, however it remains a valid action and therefore formally allowed. Furthermore, there is a Boolean object, which is the root object of both True and False, as both are derivatives of the root object. The Boolean object itself, however, does not provide any practical application.
It's a side effect of pass-by-reference. In most languages you have to guess if something is passed by value/ref. In xoscript everything is always a reference.
Congratulations on launching this. I see why you posted the 'history' page first, as it's obviously been a long story!
But from a visitor's perspective, I suggest you let the code tell the story.
Some code samples on the homepage would be very useful. Especially as, from the syntax, it looks like it isn't just another C-family language.
Thank you, I will do that.
To give you an idea how server code looks:
Here is an example for server code, just added a minute ago: https://xoscript.com/docs.xo?chapter=examples
I’m curious about some of the design choices.
Having a period / full stop as the EOL punctuation rather than a semicolon is a nice idea. But personally I think the idea of a line terminator is antiquated.
Using square brackets for strings feels superfluous when you have to quote the strings anyway. Was there a reason for this design?
I don’t like the “stop” keyword either. Is that doing anything special that the ‘.’ punctuation isn’t already doing? If so, that should be clearer.
Using whitespace to reference objects instead of ‘::’, ‘->’ or ‘.’ is also counterintuitive. However at least this is just familiarity issue; at least just so long as tabs and multiple spaces don’t break the method calls. Otherwise you then have an easy way to introduce hard-to-spot bugs.
Iteration syntax is weirdly terse compared to the verbosity of the rest of the language. I’m not saying the syntax is bad, but it feel jarring at first when compared to the design choices of the rest of the language.
On the positive side of things, it’s nice to see someone experimenting with language syntax. There’s definitely aspects I do like there too.
I would love to further discuss some syntax issues.
- STOP is from telegraphs. \n is also allowed.
- The assymetric string boundaries (brackets) allow you to embed quotes/boundaries without escaping.
what is terse about the loops?
any further thoughts about EOL?
1. ‘stop’ reads like a change of execution flow (like ‘continue’, ‘break’, and ‘return’) rather than an ASCII control code. I appreciate you’re taking that from telegraphs but I wonder if you’re better off using the control code name (LF) instead?
2. Interesting. Have you got any examples of this? Every example I’ve seen thus far has been
[‘string constant’]
{ :i
…
} * 101
Now I’m not saying the syntax is bad. In fact part of me rather likes it. But it definitely surprised me.
Similarly the IF conditions surprised me with their tenseness. Though i do like their syntax too.
Regarding the fizzbuzz example, why do some conditions have TRUE while others do not. Eg
(i = 0) continue.
(i % 15 = 0) true: {
…
), continue.
Is it because closures require that explicitness?
1. I guess this is just personal taste, we can add aliases if you like. lf (lowercase seems nice). Smalltalk itself uses brk. Could at both. Personally I love the 'touch' of history, makes it seem like there is continuum in tech somehow. But that's just personal taste as well.
2. ['the word 'Hello' has 5 chars'] ['I say: "Hi There!"'] ['In xoscript we use [' and '] ']
this is not allowed: ['this causes a '] parsing error.']
3. It's all just message passing.
- {} * x is just message * with arg x - yes it's a function, which is an object, and it has a method called * - Smalltalk uses times: { ... } times: 101.
- True is an object - (i = i) yields True, so you can send a messages to True - continue/break only work with True - , means: continue talking to object (True)
Interesting to see, Gabor. I don't like the "stop" thing. I think the verbosity can be tuned down a bit in that case, but I understand the small-talk message passing need for "Out write". Am I allowed to use just write "out" instead of "Out"? I assume case sensitivity, but I couldn't find in the docs anything about it.
I have used RedBeanPHP for many things and contributed a bit. Thank you.
Out is used in a static/class-like sense here, hence the uppercase letter. It means it should not be treated as an instance (although it technically does not really matter).
I’m getting some Smalltalk vibes looking at the examples.
Oh, I just read it was mentioned in the history of the project too.
I know it's probably not for everyone, but yeah I like the general idea of Smalltalk. However, xoscript does not have the whole vm/image thing. Also no classes, just prototypes. So I guess it sits more between smalltalk and js. You can create a class by overriding the new-method of an object though. That will essentially give you a class.
I don't quite get what the language means by being pure object oriented since it seems to support varinle assignment and thus side effects?
it means there are objects, everything is an object. That has nothing to do with side-effects.
[stub for offtopicness]
Reminders from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
"The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues."
I don't applaud or condemn this, but it's strange that it's on the home and history pages. Putting this in a code of conduct document for collaborators might make sense, but on the home page? Maybe I'm the weird one, but for most languages I consider them a tool. So it's like going to the hardware store and seeing a hammer that has a label "This is not a Liberal or Conservative hammer." Yeah, buddy I know. It's just a hammer.
It's kinda funny. There is a popular claim that goes something like "silence or inaction is implicit support for the status quo." The point is that there's not really such a thing as "not taking sides."
I don't quite agree with that, simply because no matter how many things you do take a stance on, there's always an infinite number of things that you haven't taken a stance on.
But when you go out of your way to explicitly mention that you're refusing to take a stance on all social or political issues, that actually does feel pretty close to explicit approval of the status quo for all social or political issues. Of course this likely was not the intent! So why say it at all?!
The stronger form of it is "Inaction in the face of oppression supports the oppressor."
I don't feel oppressed. I'm just happy with my life.
In this quote you'd be the one being inactive, not the oppressed nor the oppressor.
Youre not really helping yourself here
glad you dont feel oppressed though
> The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues
TBH despite what it claims, to me it sounds like a political statement by itself.
(also it is usually the developers of a language -or other project- being judged about their actions/beliefs, not the languages/projects themselves :-P)
I'm assuming it's referring to not using terms like "slave" or "master", etc etc. There isn't quite the same parallel when talking about a hammer.
I was having doubts about this too. But in today's (geo)political climate it might be useful. Otherwise I can always delete it. But you're right, it's just a hammer.
and.. I want to avoid having to add a coc. Can try.
- Why did you close your eyes ?
- So that the room will be empty.
As it usually goes you'd then tolerate hateful, bigoted folks in the name of openness and Free Speech Absolutism™ (which is totally non-political /s) and chase away women, minorities and folks who care about them.
If this isn't your intention, a CoC is the way to go.
You regrettably can't make hate disappear by pretending it doesn't exist.
I don’t think that’s fair. But i do get how others might read into that too.
Personally i read it more like “this project avoids having any political stance.” Similar to the HN guidelines on politics.
However i do agree that it’s better to remove that message and have no comment on politics, than to comment so visibly that you’re unwilling to comment. Even if you read charitably into the message, it’s still just a distraction on valuable page real estate.
I dont care what you or anyone else thinks. I give you a free tool. That's all.
You've put it on a forge with issues and PRs open, which implies you expect external contributions.
I'm trying to warn you about the implicit message your copy sends.
It will chase away the folks I mentioned, and some day you'll discover that one of your non-political core contributors goes by @zyklon1488 on twitter.
>one of your non-political core contributors goes by @zyklon1488 on twitter
I think this is exactly what author meant? This is just a tool, private life or political opinions of contributors are not relevant, as long as they don't try to force them on other project members. The only thing that matters is the quality of submitted code.
But by doing this, you limit your talent pool to folks who accept to associate with hateful folks.
Seems to be a newly emerging pattern, with now at least two examples. Here's the other one I'm aware of (from the Gleam programming language homepage):
Friendly As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.
Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.
There's always a loud someone who'll try to force their country's political issue du jour because "everything is political".
well that's what I want to avoid. What it means is that someone like xlibre-author could create a pr and I will not reject it.
> The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues.
does this mean something?
i was very confused by your description of xoscript as typeless. only typeless languages i know of are languages where a variable can only be a word. i assume you mean it's dynamically typed.
every new language that gets on hn gets two criticisms: they don't show code first thing, and they don't start with what problem is being solved by designing a new language. i'm not very interested in those things. i would, however, like to be told what it is in a concise way. you've basically got, if i understand correctly, a smalltalk-like system here, prototype based instead of class based, with dynamically scoped variables, and you're tooling it with server side scripting in mind. that tells me a lot more than code.
as for the what-problem-are-you-solving-by-designing-this-language criticism, if we're honest we can see that every language is either designed as an experiment, "what would a language be like if...?", or it's designed as a matter of personal ergonomics, "i want language X with differences i, j, and k cuz i like it that way." i'm completely fine with that.
I used PHP, nodejs, Python etc and I just wanted something simpler. I use OpenBSD as my server os and I wanted a scripting language that matches the simplicity (and security) of OpenBSD.
maybe I'll add support for pledge/unveil (with cgi) as well - what do you think?
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