I started casually working on scrapscript in 2015. I built a few compilers over the years to test out various ideas/implementations, and I think I'm finally happy with the overall design.
The code is not public yet. Email me at hello@taylor.town if you're interested in joining the core team later this year.
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback :)
That's wildly cool.
This and Val Town [0] feel like they were made for each other. If you added them together with a nice front-end like mmm.page [1] I bet a million devs would sign up.
I'm working on something in a similar space that I'm hoping mihht develop into that [2]
It makes sense that the next step for the web is a more low-level social platform that works more like an agnostic API than a walled garden.
This is pretty much my plan for the next few years, with some added surprises :)
I really want to rekindle the days of geocities and flash. I call this "the cheap web" haha
I've also been working on open standards for authentication and payments within the ecosystem, but I'm not quite happy with the results yet. I don't like this world where we have to use companies like Auth0 and Stripe to build something worthwhile. I'm open to ideas!
Excited to see where this project goes.
Side note: I was just watching the val.town video and at the end he mentions that "you are an object" and other people can access your properties. It immediately made me think of playing hackmud. Not sure if that's a good thing or bad!
> pre { overflow-x: scroll; }
`overflow: scroll` is very poorly named, and practically never the right tool. You want `overflow: auto` instead, which only renders scrollbars if they’re needed.
(Long ago, there were two potentially valid scenarios for it: for avoiding reflow when changing the document’s length, and for unbreaking viewport units so that 100vw includes the viewport’s vertical scrollbar. The former was only exceedingly rarely useful, and can be achieved better now on all but Safari with the scrollbar-gutter property. The latter only Firefox ever implemented, and no one else wanted to, so they eventually removed it from the spec and from Firefox, so now viewport units are just stupidly broken by design. I myself have not found a single place I wanted to use `overflow: scroll` or where it would have been reasonable in the past decade. Stylesheet linters should include a default rule that complains about `overflow: scroll` because it’s so temptingly-named but so thoroughly not what you want.)
By default, using a name like `janedoe91/fibonacci` pulls the latest version of that particular scrap from the scrapyard. But all of its references are baked-in unless the author updates them.
The way around this is that consumers are empowered to use whatever forcing upgrade strategies they want. All scraps are transparent, so you can pipe everything through an "upgrader" scrap before execution, which replaces dependencies all the way down the stack with their latest versions. I'm sure many of these upgraders will exist depending on what types of tradeoffs you're looking for.
As I see it most of the more unique ideas could be implemented in form of some tooling on top of some existing languages.
What do I overlook here?
Do equivalent programs produce the same hash?
Ie: a = 1 + 1 Return a
Vs
a = 2 Return a
What if local internal variable names change?
Ie
b = 2 Return b
This looks really interesting to me.
There is a feature I would like that I have never seen in a scripting language, and I wonder if Scrap might support it:
> Monadic bind points and applicative join points in the script language
Hopefully an example can convey what I mean.
Bind:
do {
let! x = some_value_in_a_monad
x + 1
}
do {
let! x = some_value_in_a_monad
and! y = another_value_in_a_monad
(x + y) * y
}
Is this possible in Scrap?
Also how does this not create either an enormous tangle of circular references or a huge pile of unused... scrap?
For instance, suppose "foo" produces a structure and "bar" consumes it - what happens if the user passes the output of "foo version 10" to "bar version 1"?
I wish there was an example of a moderately-complex scrapbook, so that I could see what the code looks like when you start mixing several scraps and need a minimum of scaffolding.
Thanks to the author, this is a very exciting thing.
Of course, ligatures without the "disable ligature under a cursor" extension are slightly weird, but it even adds charm, we're on a site "for hackers" (laughing).
So, well, what kind of a ChatGPT can come up with something like that? :)
Not every idea deserves to have an esoteric language attached to it to work.
EDIT: the author claims that it will be open sourced soon :)
Maybe check out the Joy programming language? It seems well-suited to this domain.
If each scrap carries its own versions of its dependencies, then even the "same type" could actually be a "different type" because of version mismatches?
It makes me feel like some hacker dweebs in the future would be communicating through this platform.
Looks interesting though. Would like play with this when it's released.