Show HN: Xoscript

    The None object represents emptiness, or better still, the absence of information. On occasion, you will receive this object as an answer to a message, in case of the result being nothing. The most essential question you could ask the None object is: None?. The answer will always read True.

Congratulations on launching this. I see why you posted the 'history' page first, as it's obviously been a long story!

But from a visitor's perspective, I suggest you let the code tell the story.

Some code samples on the homepage would be very useful. Especially as, from the syntax, it looks like it isn't just another C-family language.

I’m curious about some of the design choices.

Having a period / full stop as the EOL punctuation rather than a semicolon is a nice idea. But personally I think the idea of a line terminator is antiquated.

Using square brackets for strings feels superfluous when you have to quote the strings anyway. Was there a reason for this design?

I don’t like the “stop” keyword either. Is that doing anything special that the ‘.’ punctuation isn’t already doing? If so, that should be clearer.

Using whitespace to reference objects instead of ‘::’, ‘->’ or ‘.’ is also counterintuitive. However at least this is just familiarity issue; at least just so long as tabs and multiple spaces don’t break the method calls. Otherwise you then have an easy way to introduce hard-to-spot bugs.

Iteration syntax is weirdly terse compared to the verbosity of the rest of the language. I’m not saying the syntax is bad, but it feel jarring at first when compared to the design choices of the rest of the language.

On the positive side of things, it’s nice to see someone experimenting with language syntax. There’s definitely aspects I do like there too.

Interesting to see, Gabor. I don't like the "stop" thing. I think the verbosity can be tuned down a bit in that case, but I understand the small-talk message passing need for "Out write". Am I allowed to use just write "out" instead of "Out"? I assume case sensitivity, but I couldn't find in the docs anything about it.

I have used RedBeanPHP for many things and contributed a bit. Thank you.

I’m getting some Smalltalk vibes looking at the examples.

Oh, I just read it was mentioned in the history of the project too.

I don't quite get what the language means by being pure object oriented since it seems to support varinle assignment and thus side effects?

[stub for offtopicness]

Reminders from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

hi...