scrapscript.py

https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/scrapscript/

by surprisetalk • 2 years ago

316 67 2 years ago

bernsteinbear.com

rahimnathwani• 2 years ago

This is about how scrapscript is implemented.

There was a popular Show HN about 9 months ago, about scrapscript itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35712163

aardvarkr• 2 years ago

Interesting tidbit: the book series that this website is named for is actually spelled berEnstAin bears, emphasis on the letters that everyone (including myself) remembers being spelled the other way. I literally learned this yesterday

LeonB• 2 years ago

I concur! This is considered part of her Mandela effect^1 isn’t it?

The Wikipedia article on the aforementioned bears even has a section on it —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstain_Bears#Name_confusio...

^1 - which was the Mandala effect, in my original universe, I’m sure.

lkirkwood• 2 years ago

Why would it be the Mandala effect? It's named for the mass false memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 80s.

juliusgeo• 2 years ago

I think the website name is a pun based on the last name of its author.

tekknolagi5• 2 years ago

Correct!

NoZebra120vClip• 2 years ago

everyone

The books were a very minor part of my childhood, but I noticed immediately, and my family always pronounced it correctly.

hitekker• 2 years ago

I enjoyed the link to the language checklist https://www.mcmillen.dev/language_checklist.html

CodeCompost• 2 years ago

Same here. It's the first time I've ever seen it.

popcorncowboy• 2 years ago

Programming in this language is an adequate punishment for inventing it

I was already laughing hard by this final punchline. Bravo.

deepnet• 2 years ago

Elegant and pure.

I also like the Javascript lambda calculus this is a fork of.

Like early Haskell when it was just for fun before Haskell's Meta-monadic library sprawl that upped the learning curve

cdchn• 2 years ago

Making python scripts into an 'Actually Portable Executable' is what really interested me here.

fermigier3• 2 years ago

Is this the reason why there is only one 5+ KLOC module (which includes the tests)? I personally prefer short / shorter modules with clear responsibilities.

tekknolagi5• 2 years ago

No. This is not a limitation of APE/Cosmopolitan. This is just my personal preference because imports get tricky in Python land unless you either have a single file or go Full Package Mode. There's probably a world where we split the tests out, though.

semi-extrinsic2• 2 years ago

Not just python scripts, you can package any C code as well. We've used it to compile up a "python.com" APE file with a python 3.11 interpreter that has lots of packages (including C extensions) that we can just drop straight into old airgapped lab instrument computers and get a modern python data analysis suite up and running.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Now integrate Shedskin the Python compiler. :)

cl3misch2• 2 years ago

That sounds very interesting! I probably could hack it together myself, but do you happen to have a writeup on that, or maybe some pointers on how to include the numpy-scipy stack into the executable?

iainmerrick• 2 years ago

I'm a little confused by this part:

This executable is theoretically runnable on all major platforms without fuss. And the Docker container that we build with it [...]

It sounds like they're putting an APE inside a Docker container, but why would you want both?

zilti• 2 years ago

Because some people throw a tantrum if it doesn't come pre-dockerized, I suppose

zem• 2 years ago

perhaps to integrate with tooling that wants to work with containers

cl3misch2• 2 years ago

No, they build the APE with a docker container. The APE itself is... actually portable.

Karupan3• 2 years ago

I have to admit this broke my brain. This is the first time I'm hearing about content addressable languages, and once you get over that barrier, a distributed language doesn't seem far fetched.

As a big fan of functional programming, is this something that is going to just end up being an esoteric language? Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the vision of the authors, but after being bitten by the Elm bug and that crashing and burning, I'm just cautious of getting invested in new languages and tools.

adius• 2 years ago

Nothing crashed and burned. Elm is in a state where it’s fully usable and has all the futures you need. I use it every day!

Since it’s a DSL to create HTML + JS + CSS websites, you still get all the new features of browsers!

Karupan3• 2 years ago

Except for the compiler bugs, lack of self hosted package management, improvements to tooling, etc. I use it regularly too, but it is frustrating to see it in a state of decay.

They can definitely claim the above points and more are not goals, and Evan absolutely has every right to do so. But don’t be surprised when devs see it as dead.

mst3• 2 years ago

I think, even though I can absolutely see the arguments for doing so, locking down the compiler to no longer accept external native extensions was a huge mistake community wise, since a lot of the people advocating for Elm were the sort of early adopter who really really wants an escape hatch because they're in the habit of getting into situations where they need one no matter what tools they're using.

Certainly that describes me, and when all the people who seemed to be like me got told to go sit on a cactus by the Elm core developers and bailed out to work with something else, my experiments got pretty much immediately shelved and Elm moved into the "interesting place to steal ideas from, actively hostile to my actually using it" category.

This may be unfair, but I'm pretty sure it's a reasonable description of what -did- happen, fair or not.

MarceColl• 2 years ago

In case you don't know about this, this is kind of what they are trying to achieve: https://www.unison-lang.org/

Karupan3• 2 years ago

Thank you, this looks awesome. I already have a use case in mind, so will explore unison since it seems more mature.

slowmotiony2• 2 years ago

I still don't get it, could someone smarter than me explain?

helloWorld : '{IO, Exception} () helloWorld _ = printLine "Hello World"

The example above is followed by explanation "{IO, Exception} indicates which abilities the program needs to do I/O and throw exceptions." Well, which abilities does it need then? No idea.

csantini• 2 years ago

Interesting idea, but isn't code addressable already in most languages?

We call them modules/libraries and we pip/npm install them from Github and you can keep track of changes/versions/PRs.

kitd• 2 years ago

Content-addressable, not code addressable. It's kind of like global, distributed memoization (IIUC).

edit: not memoization, just hashing the AST of a function.

trenchgun3• 2 years ago

Content addressable has a very specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage

Modules and libraries are addressable based on their names or URI:s.

"Unison eliminates name conflicts. Many dependency conflicts are caused by different versions of a library "competing" for the same names. Unison references defintions by hash, not by name, and multiple versions of the same library can be used within a project." https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/what-problems-does-unison-s...

"Here's the big idea behind Unison, which we'll explain along with some of its benefits:

Each Unison definition is identified by a hash of its syntax tree.

Put another way, Unison code iscontent-addressed. Here's an example, the increment function on Nat:

increment : Nat -> Nat increment n = n + 1

While we've given this function a human-readable name (and the function Nat.+ also has a human-readable name), names are just separately stored metadata that don't affect the function's hash. The syntax tree of increment that Unison hashes looks something like:

increment = (#arg1 -> #a8s6df921a8 #arg1 1)

Unison uses 512-bit SHA3 hashes, which have unimaginably small chances of collision.

If we generated one million unique Unison definitions every second, we should expect our first hash collision after roughly 100 quadrillion years! " https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/

throwaway2902• 2 years ago

That does not sound like it could make any money though...

fermigier3• 2 years ago

This reminds me of a talk Tim Berners-Lee did in 2002 (at the 10th Python conference):

https://www.w3.org/2002/Talks/0206-python/ ("Webizing Python")

I wasn't there but I remember hearing that this wasn't well received by the participants.

Also, TBL references a post by Aaron Swartz at the end of his slides: https://web.archive.org/web/20050208021219/logicerror.com/we... (also titled "Webizing Python")

account-52• 2 years ago

Can someone explain what this is? Why it's a good thing? What's it's for? I have to admit based on reading the post I have absolutely no idea.

KTibow• 2 years ago

From reading https://scrapscript.org/ it sounds like its main feature is that things can be split up, put on platforms like IPFS, and distributed allowing you to access them from wherever.

surprisetalk4• 2 years ago

I should probably write a longer post about this, but scrapscript is an attempt to fix a lot of the "in-between" problems in software engineering.

Instead of working on "real" problems, I find myself battling untyped/undocumented YAML/JSON configurations, syncing JSON encoders/decoders, massaging incompatible dependencies, writing unholy SQL, etc.

I obviously don't have all the answers, but a system with the following properties seems like a worthwhile pursuit: (1) small enough to be used like JSON yet powerful enough to used like Javascript, (2) cryptographic guarantees that code is compatible over time, (3) a compiler that checks live servers for compatibility before deploying, (4) simple but expressive type system, (5) a package manager that facilitates all of this at a granular level... and so on.

On top of all that, I think these properties lend themselves to some grand ambitions like "a new internet" and a "google-docs live coding editor experience". Maybe I'm just full of myself though haha

scrapscript.py is the first real attempt at making scrapscript a reality, so some folks who feel these pains are getting excited to see some movement on the project.

EDIT: Here’s my recent scrapyard demo, if you want to see it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SngOLU5G1Eg

account-52• 2 years ago

Still not sure I fully understand, but that is more than likely down to my ignorance. I really appreciate your effort in explaining here. I should mention I'm not a full time developer and certainly not a webdev so this might be why I'm not grokking this. Thanks.

mst3• 2 years ago

I'd been kind of interested by https://yglu.io/ and now ingy's new piece of insanity https://yamlscript.org/ - helm appears to let you inject your own script to template charts and I was wondering about trying a wrapper around one of those (because text templating an indentation sensitive language like YAML makes me itch).

I think scrapscript is a really interesting idea, mind, this isn't a "here's an alternative" type comment, it's a "here's things that I think are neat in a similar way to how I think scrapscript is neat" :)

Edit: I forgot something! https://trout.me.uk/lisp/termite-r7rs.pdf is a paper on adding library support to the cross-network (kinda erlangish) termite scheme extensions - and leans heavily on content addressable-ness. Termite itself has gone the way of small lisp projects but I kept this around specifically for the content addressable stuff having been solidly worked out in a language I understood; maybe that'll come in handy for ideas for you as well.

dflock• 2 years ago

I assume you're well aware of: https://www.unison-lang.org/ - as well as 9p and union mounting from plan9.

nerdponx• 2 years ago

It might be interesting to include a comparison with Dhall and Jsonnet while you're writing docs.

asveikau• 2 years ago

(2) cryptographic guarantees that code is compatible over time,

What does this mean? You hash dependencies?

(3) a compiler that checks live servers for compatibility before deploying,

Why does a compiler need to talk to a server? Why should it? Seems like a huge step backwards in what a compiler is and expecting it to work later on.

manifoldgeo• 2 years ago

I find myself battling untyped/undocumented YAML/JSON configurations, syncing JSON encoders/decoders, massaging incompatible dependencies

I feel your pain on having to manage so many dependencies. I write primarily in Python, and the various pip / Pipenv / pipx / PDM / Poetry dependency managers drive me pretty crazy. That's not even accounting for the multiple Python versions I need!

That said, I'm surprised that you're trying to _alleviate_ this by implementing your FP language in Python. The Python ecosystem is full of half-documented config files, incompatible dependency trees, etc.

Have you considered implementing it in any other languages after the Python one proves its worth? For example, if the language becomes strong enough, would you consider writing a scrapscript compiler in scrapscript, itself?

ingenieroariel• 2 years ago

Since this uses cosmopolitan and the build script already downloads portable binaries from https://cosmo.zip has there any thought been given to wrap other portable binaries in scrapscript / download them?

Small, pure, functional, content-addressable and network-first sounds a lot like a mini Nix+ca-derivations [1]

[1] https://www.tweag.io/blog/2021-12-02-nix-cas-4/

scrapscript.py

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