FOfogus·Jul 24, 2014
> What's left?
LISP in BAYSICK? https://github.com/fogus/baysick
In Lisp in QBASICfogus
baysick
Scala2010–2014
fogus / baysick
baysick
An embedded Insane-specific Language for Scala implementing the BASIC programming language
3Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
244GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
An embedded Insane-specific Language for Scala implementing the BASIC programming language
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2010-06-08 14:05:26 UTC to 2014-07-24 14:57:34 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesI think this is a well-thought out article. We use Scala quite extensively at Hulu, and it is important to use its more powerful features only when they really make sense. You can do quite amazing things with the language, but it doesn't mean you should.
I think a classic example of going overboard with Scala is a dispatch library - even as someone who writes Scala extensively, it is incomprehensible to me. On the other hand, for certain tasks, being able to craft an internal DSL is a great thing. For a hobby project I once wrote a DSL for a simplex solver in Scala, turned out pretty neat:
https://github.com/ZenBowman/AIMA/blob/master/src/test/scala...
And then there's a great version of embedded BASIC in Scala:
https://github.com/fogus/baysick
With great power comes great responsibility, and it is important to remember the Perlis rule:
Read the rest
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon
> Isn't there also a Scala DSL that lets you make it look like basic?
Yep, it's called Baysick - https://github.com/fogus/baysick
In Lisp is Too PowerfulLook at the chapter in the book on DSLs
and the take-away is "don't try to build
internal DSLs".
Which book do you mean? Also, do you mind elaborating on why one should avoid building DSLs with Scala? In my own experience [1] I've found it extremely nice for internal DSLs.
[1]: https://github.com/fogus/baysick
In Why Scala seems difficult but really isn’tThe problem is that if you have a language
designed to make it easy to do this, you
encourage people to do it.
As the author of the BASIC DSL[1] in question, I must say that it was decidedly not easy to do. It would appear that Baysick is the number one reason that Scala hasn't swept the enterprise.
[1]: http://github.com/fogus/baysick
In Scala Considered Harmful For Large Projects?Beautiful is relative, but I am quite proud of my implementation of a BASIC DSL in Scala. http://github.com/fogus/baysick
In Good Lisp code to read