FatScript

2022-10-04 | aprates.dev

[1] Leia este post em português

Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it's bad. - Cory House

I'm a little sorry for not being able to share this experience with my friends who don't program. If I made a painting or a piece of music, I could be proud and say to them: "Look what I did."

You know, maybe they won't think it's impressive, but I wish they could at least understand.

If I show source code, they'll be like, "This is like reading Klingon." (got the Star Track reference? hehe). It really sucks that you can't share these artworks with non-programmers.

But anyway…

For the last few months I have been working on a pet project, a new programming language and it's interpreter.

Two important events led me to embark on this journey:

1. Many years ago I tried to simplify the work we were doing at Senac Rio using ActionScript (Flash), creating a configuration language that perhaps looked a bit like modern YAML. I named it at that time "FatScript".

2. I met Sady, a friend from those times, and we remembered the story of fatscript. I got home and found in my backups some traces of that unfinished project, and other more recent notes.

And so it begins…

The current endeavour started as an exercise to recap on tokenization, using some tutorials I found for JavaScript on the web, and since my ActionScript code would also be useless, I decided to start over from scratch in C.

I jotted down a lot of cool features that I like in Python, JavaScript, Scala, C and other ideas here and there, I also remembered some things that I considered bad and that I would like to avoid and started mixing and matching the syntax that I thought would stay out of the way when programming.

I've been doing this for at least 6 months, a few hours, every day. It's like some sort of puzzle game or an art, and it's a lot of fun, most of the time.

Finally I decided to make public the full implementation of "fry, the fatscript interpreter" under the GNU GPL v3 license. And this is what you can checkout now, if you like!

Let my art speak for itself

I won't dive into details here, but I invite you to explore the official language documentation:

[2] https://fatscript.org

You can be part of it

I think this project already has a life and personality of its own, as something that is growing organically.

Every time I look at the codebase, two or three new features seem possible to improve, which is great. But alone I got here, and in a collaborative way we can go even further.

So, if you are a programmer who enjoys learning new languages and would like to participate in this project, this is the right time. There's a lot to explore here.

If you want to join, leave a comment on the GitLab issue tracker or Reddit community, it will be a pleasure to exchange ideas with you.

[3] https://reddit.com/r/fatscript

FatScript

And so it begins…

Let my art speak for itself

You can be part of it

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