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hhas
iris-script
Swift2020–2020
hhas / iris-script

iris-script

A modern Logo-like language with user-friendly “pidgin-English” syntax. Word-based, homoiconic, composable. See wiki for background.

2Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
19GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A modern Logo-like language with user-friendly “pidgin-English” syntax. Word-based, homoiconic, composable. See wiki for background.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by week4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-07-19 07:09:17 UTC to 2020-09-28 20:57:42 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.

0122020-07-13 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-20 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsJul 132020-07-20 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-27 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-07-27 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-08-03 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-08-03 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-08-10 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-08-10 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-08-17 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-08-17 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-08-24 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsAug 172020-08-24 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-08-31 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-08-31 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-09-07 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-09-07 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-09-14 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-09-14 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-09-21 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-09-21 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-09-28 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-09-28 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-10-05 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsSep 28

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jul 132020-07-13 00:00:00 UTC2020-07-20 00:00:00 UTC202
Jul 202020-07-20 00:00:00 UTC2020-07-27 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 272020-07-27 00:00:00 UTC2020-08-03 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 32020-08-03 00:00:00 UTC2020-08-10 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 102020-08-10 00:00:00 UTC2020-08-17 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 172020-08-17 00:00:00 UTC2020-08-24 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 242020-08-24 00:00:00 UTC2020-08-31 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 312020-08-31 00:00:00 UTC2020-09-07 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 72020-09-07 00:00:00 UTC2020-09-14 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 142020-09-14 00:00:00 UTC2020-09-21 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 212020-09-21 00:00:00 UTC2020-09-28 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 282020-09-28 00:00:00 UTC2020-10-05 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
And this is me caring not one jot how I look. I’ve probably invested 10,000 hours over 20 years, not just helping myself but on helping other users as well. And that all that’s down the drain thanks to some incompetent primadonna who doesn’t play well with experts who know more than him. It’s not just me either, but I say it because it needs to be said, because unless you identify the failure there’s no hope in hell of finding a fix. Mac Automation isn’t on its ass because it’s old or bad technology; it’s on its ass because it was horribly mismanaged by a clueless incompetent of a project manager. The tech could still be fixed; the problem now is politics. That’s why I think it’s borked, but until the last ax drops I’ll keep on trying to salvage it anyway because I care that much about the fundamental principle: putting power and control
Read the rest
back in the hands of the users. https://github.com/hhas/iris-script
In One Apple Programmer Got Apps Talking to Each Other
“it's really helpful to have one obvious way” Counterpoint: Python format strings. (I think there’s four or five different built-in ways to do those now.) Python’s “batteries included” may have helped it to win vital audience early on, but it’s also locked in a ton of deadweight that’s seriously slowed down its own evolution since, while bloating its feature complexity to such a level I could not recommend Python as a good language for beginners now. Which suggests there’s a more general meta-problem waiting to be solved here: how to [automatically] mass-migrate code written against interface A when a superior successor B comes along. I have many gripes about Apple’s #SwiftLang, but seriously appreciate that this is one requirement they’ve given some thought to. Having seen the decade-long logistical horror of Python’s relatively minor 2-
Read the rest
to-3 upgrade, Xcode’s ability to auto-update projects written for one Swift version to another has let them evolve the language with minimal pain. And while I’m not a fan of Lisp itself (a decent first attempt that should’ve been vastly bettered by now), I think its metaprogramming model an obvious foundation for such an automated migration system. Thus, rather than bake in all the libraries, keep the libraries external and build in a standard mechanism for migrating codebases written for one onto another. In essence, automated refactoring by “recipes”, where these recipes are as common and easy-to-use as the libraries themselves. .. Of course, this still leaves the other (larger) problem of how to sort out current trash houses like PyPI, NPM, LuaRocks, et al, where contributors’ enthusiasm is not necessarily matched by their knowledge, competence, and ability to savagely critique their own work before inflicting it on the world (you know, the “Science” bit in “Computer Science”). Preferably without destroying that enthusiasm in the process, since there’s no point having a wonderfully polished platform without bums on seats as well—a perennial Lisp failing, it should be noted. This is not merely idle speculation on my part. Many years ago I cut my teeth on AppleScript, which makes the stdlib-starved Lua look like fat Python 2, and tried to bootstrap a library ecosystem for it more than once. Good practice. Zero success†. And now I’m trying to devise a “stealth Lisp” successor to them all (https://github.com/hhas/iris-script), I realise cracking the greater library problem is what will make the next generation of languages. A platform is only as robust and dependable as its weakest component, and for as long as a buggy or withdrawn left-pad function can tip the whole stack over then it’s not robust at all. But this is as much a sociological challenge as a technical one, and not one I’ve got answers to yet. -- † After which I realized it’d be far easier just to port the useful bits of AppleScript to Python instead. Which almost worked too… but that’s another story.
In Fennel – Lisp in Lua
“they felt it disorienting to express in their own native language programming constructs that they'd learned in English” Trust me, going from natural-language English to programming-language English is just as discombobulating. (Been there, done that; made a deliberate point of remembering that experience.) If you’re only testing it with existing programmers, you’re bound to skew your results because anything new and different to what they’re already used to is a disruption to their established flow. As in any scientific research, designing the right control for your trial is critical to avoiding GIGO. A better test would be taking groups of English and non-English non-programmers, and teaching both of them entirely from scratch. (This assumes, of course, that each group’s teaching materials have been human-localized to the same standard
Read the rest
, and all trainers follow the same script.) That way you avoid polluting your results with preconceptions and existing biases. Out of interest, is there any more public information of your work here? iris-script[1], my own end-user-friendly language project and obvious anagram, has a way to go before I can begin to explore localizability, but it’s on the TODO list so I am collecting links to relevant material. Ta. -- [1] https://github.com/hhas/iris-script
In Citrine: Localized Programming Language

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