Anyway, so I'm watching the hugely entertaining video to which you linked, only to find that a comment I made about Rockstar on HN a long while ago is on the video: https://youtu.be/gdSlcxxYAA8?t=3226 -- totally unexpected. Brought a smile to my face. Thank you for sharing!
I've just finished listening to that great talk before I searched HN to check up on the original share, surprised to see such a recent repost! I don't recall laughing out loud so often at a dev talk while it also showed some amazing snippets of, well, the art of code.
If someone has other talks of this nature to recommend (and is lost in this 7d+ post), I'm all ears.
This is how Advent of Code day 7 solution looks like in Rockstar [1]:
My plaything is your mind
Cast my plaything into the void
Listen to my heart
Shatter my heart with the void
Natsuki is frightened
Yuri is gentleness
Poems are invaluable
Rock reality
While my heart isn't mysterious
Roll my heart into the world
Burn the world into my hope
If my hope is less than Natsuki
Let Natsuki be my hope
If my hope is greater than Yuri
Let Yuri be my hope
Let Sayori be reality at my hope
If Sayori is mysterious
Sayori is hereabouts
Build Sayori up
Let reality at my hope be Sayori
Build poems up
My end is justifying
My thoughts are knowledgable
Let the volume be poems over my thoughts
My hope is accessible
Turn down the volume
Build Yuri up
While my hope is less than Yuri
Let my target be reality at my hope
If my target is not mysterious
Let the volume be the volume without my target
If my end is nothing
If the volume is less than my end
Let my end be my hope
Build my hope up
My hope is accessible
My passion is literature
My heart is courageous
Knock my heart down
While my hope is less than Yuri
Let my poem be reality at my hope
If my poem is not mysterious
Let my fear be my end without my hope
If my fear is as weak as my heart
Let my fear be my fear of my heart
Let my fear be my fear of my poem
Let my passion be my passion with my fear
Build my hope up
Shout my passion
>Airline Food is an esoteric programming language created by User:Largejamie in April 2021 whose programs are supposed to look like Jerry Seinfeld's stand-up.
Factorial: Takes an input from the user and outputs its factorial
You ever notice this?
What's the deal with airline food?
What's the deal with it? Right?
So...
Um,
Just like it.
Yeah, Not like this.
Moving on...
Um, See?
You wouldn't believe how many bands from the eighties/nineties are still around - out of the spotlight, some of them not with the original lineup, but still there for their faithful fans.
Except for R.E.M. unfortunately, who disbanded in 2011...
Nice to see people rediscovering this language from time to time. I wrote an interpreter for an early version several years ago, just for fun. Possibly my favourite esoteric language. I particularly love the philosophy of "if you write even a single line of Rockstar, then you can consider yourself a full-fledged Rockstar programmer" (I'm paraphrasing, but I remember something like that in some official documentation).
I was excited initially, but Hair Metal is an obvious no-go for me.
Although it could be fun to do "reverse Perl poetry", and find Hard Rock / Hair Metal songs whose lyrics are valid Rockstar code. That way, we could finally find out what that one special song really means.
The song that I think would compile with the fewest changes to the language spec is Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane". I don't think it'd reveal any hidden meaning or anything, though... it's really just a long list of assignment statements. You need to spell 'Night' on line 2 with a capital 'N'; same with 'What' on line 4, and some liberal use of parentheses, but the first four lines do actually compile:
It's early morning, the sun comes out
Last Night was shaking and pretty loud
My cat is purring, it scratches my skin
So What is wrong (with another sin)?
The rest is, um, work in progress. And it may not be a coincidence that the stack push/pop operators in Rockstar are called "rock" and "roll", and the syntax was designed so that "rock you like a hurricane" is syntactically valid Rockstar code.
The songs would not have to do anything useful, the important point is that they are syntactically valid.
Compare "Black Perl": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl
(It was posted anonymously, but I remember reading somewhere Larry Wall has later admitted to being the author. Wikipedia claims authorship is still unclear, though.)
I had no idea. Thanks for spotting this; I've flipped the site over to use CloudFlare Full/strict TLS; if that doesn't work I can turn off CloudFlare proxying completely.
The author of Rockstar gave a _fantastic_ presentation called The Art of Code, where he eventually introduces the language. I cannot praise the talk enough. It is available on YouTube.
I recorded a song where the lyrics were a parsable brainfuck program after wondering if a) daftpunk's higher bigger faster was turing complete, and b) whether the same was true of never gonna give you up. For me it was substituting high concept for talent, but what else are you going to do in pandemic lockdown.
> The keywords it, he, she, him, her, they, them, ze, hir, zie, zir, xe, xem, ve, and ver refer to the last named variable determined by parsing order.
that was funny. let's have more social constructs in programming languages!
I've actually seriously suggested that we make pronouns like that for English.
The conventional system with just "he" and "she" and "it" is clearly inadequate because it doesn't handle the case where you have more than one noun that should have the same pronoun. That's a very easy case to hit.
We are essentially using a 1.58-bit hash function to map nouns to pronouns, which has very poor collision resistance and it is a somewhat subjective hash function when dealing with anything whose gender you aren't sure of.
We could add a bunch more pronouns to support more bits in the hash--that's what many people who consider themselves non-binary gendered are advocating. That can solve the problem of not having enough bits in the hash, but still leaves the problem of the hash function being subjective.
In fact, it makes it more subjective because at least with "he" or "she" the default is to go by appearance unless you know that this is incorrect. With zie, zir, xem, and the rest everyone is a special case.
Position based pronouns fix the hash problem by not using a hash, and fix the subjectivity problem by not being based on any characteristics of the noun to which they refer in a given sentence.
Keep "he" and "she" with their current meaning for backward compatibility, and then add new pronouns that refer to the 1st noun in the sentence, the 2nd noun in the sentence, and so on, and add a similar set that refer to the nouns in the previous sentence (and count as nouns for determining pronouns in the current sentence).
While it is probably not a very good idea to use this to code, it reminds me of something DHH once said about Ruby.
I don’t have the quote, but he said that he just loves the language because it is so fun to write for him, despite it not being the optimal language. And this alone makes him get into flow much more easily and therefore be more productive.
This alone has made me gain interest in learning Ruby. It might be slower than lots of languages out there, but backend computing power is often not the main bottleneck in your stack. Developer velocity is probably much more important when it comes to producing great software and moving fast.
This is how I look at vim. I don't think typing speed really matters for development. But I just find it so fun to see how much I can target exactly the chunk of code I want to change. It turns coding itself into a game.
Kind of a tangent, but Ruby-is-slow was always contextual. Ruby was always hugely faster than complex bash scripts for the same task. If you value launch time, Python (at least through 2.x) was always slower from a cold launch compared with Ruby.
The only registered marks for the mark “ROCKSTAR” I see in TESS for Take-Two are in the clothing and apparel industry. So if anything, it’s the T Shirts that are the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSlcxxYAA8