oh wow this is kinda nuts, I used to play around with Earnest’s oK implementation a lot for esolang / code golf stuff when I was younger, and until now I hadn’t realized he was the one behind Decker & Lil. Need to play around with that sometime for sure…
Lil probably won’t be that attractive to code golf enthusiasts (taking, for example extract orderby value asc from x in Lil versus x@<x in k), but I do hope that folks who enjoy array languages nevertheless find things to like about it. :)
It’s very recognizable, and a strong nostalgia emitter for some, like myself.
HyperCard was my second programming environment, after BASIC. I loved it at the time and continued to compare other things to it, generally unfavorably, for many years. Now I’d love to spend some time playing with Decker just for the vibes but I can’t imagine doing anything “serious” with it (not the point, I know!), so it’s sadly low down on my towering stack of interesting things to get into someday.
Interesting how he claims Awk is the best general purpose scripting language in Posix. it does make sense to avoid the Bourne shell at all costs, I suppose…
Indeed. If you need to perform general-purpose floating-point arithmetic with sh or bash, (as one might within the interpreter for a scripting language with such arithmetic operators like Lil) your options are to shell out to bc / dc / awk / etc. or to go through intensely painful and excruciatingly slow contortions to perform equivalent calculations with nothing but integers and string manipulation. As I try to explain in this podcast episode, dc and bc are often unavailable, and if I’m already obligated to push some of the work into AWK there’s no longer any advantage to using a shell script at all.
It was a fine explanation, and it was very inspiring to listen to, I regret leaving such shallow comments; there is much more profound things to be said. Looking at the Deck-Month 2 entries now.
I’m glad you enjoyed the discussion. If you (or anyone else) have questions about Decker, Lil, or any of the other topics that came up I’ll do my best to answer.
I think they do , that’s why it was surprising to me. In the podcast they talk about bash, but John claims that support for dictionaries/maps isn’t universal. Surely it isn’t POSIX so if you evaluate Bash , why not include Python then? Surely all the major distros have it, like they used to have Perl.
If “new enough bash to have dictionaries” isn’t universal in the targets he was looking at, “surely all the major distros have it” doesn’t seem like a good argument for why Python supposedly is wider spread? Either way, awk for sure is more common.
oh wow this is kinda nuts, I used to play around with Earnest’s oK implementation a lot for esolang / code golf stuff when I was younger, and until now I hadn’t realized he was the one behind Decker & Lil. Need to play around with that sometime for sure…
Lil probably won’t be that attractive to code golf enthusiasts (taking, for example
extract orderby value asc from xin Lil versusx@<xin k), but I do hope that folks who enjoy array languages nevertheless find things to like about it. :)Oh yeah I wasn’t gonna do golfing with it, if anything I prefer the extra readability for actual projects I want other people to be able to read 😅
I put the Mac tag there because John said the UI was inspired by System Software 6.
It’s very recognizable, and a strong nostalgia emitter for some, like myself.
HyperCard was my second programming environment, after BASIC. I loved it at the time and continued to compare other things to it, generally unfavorably, for many years. Now I’d love to spend some time playing with Decker just for the vibes but I can’t imagine doing anything “serious” with it (not the point, I know!), so it’s sadly low down on my towering stack of interesting things to get into someday.
Interesting how he claims Awk is the best general purpose scripting language in Posix. it does make sense to avoid the Bourne shell at all costs, I suppose…
I don’t find this statement controversial. What other general purpose scripting languages are defined in Posix?
I feel like I’m walking into a trap, but don’t most people reach for shell scripts before Awk?
Just because they do, doesn’t mean they should :D
I’m not big Awk user but I believe if nothing else its arithmetic support is much better than any shell’s.
Indeed. If you need to perform general-purpose floating-point arithmetic with sh or bash, (as one might within the interpreter for a scripting language with such arithmetic operators like Lil) your options are to shell out to
bc/dc/awk/ etc. or to go through intensely painful and excruciatingly slow contortions to perform equivalent calculations with nothing but integers and string manipulation. As I try to explain in this podcast episode,dcandbcare often unavailable, and if I’m already obligated to push some of the work into AWK there’s no longer any advantage to using a shell script at all.It was a fine explanation, and it was very inspiring to listen to, I regret leaving such shallow comments; there is much more profound things to be said. Looking at the Deck-Month 2 entries now.
I’m glad you enjoyed the discussion. If you (or anyone else) have questions about Decker, Lil, or any of the other topics that came up I’ll do my best to answer.
I think they do , that’s why it was surprising to me. In the podcast they talk about bash, but John claims that support for dictionaries/maps isn’t universal. Surely it isn’t POSIX so if you evaluate Bash , why not include Python then? Surely all the major distros have it, like they used to have Perl.
If “new enough bash to have dictionaries” isn’t universal in the targets he was looking at, “surely all the major distros have it” doesn’t seem like a good argument for why Python supposedly is wider spread? Either way, awk for sure is more common.