Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   roko's basilisk (vii@dsmc.space)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 14:47:11 JST roko's basilisk

   • pistolero
   • roko's basilisk
   @p so after an exhausting week of problem solving I needed a way to fall asleep and apparently tonight that has been making a language and shell that is a faithful superset of POSIX sh. So it's elixir, but with processes, pipes and signals instead of actors, mailboxes, and monitors.
   
   I even added a `supervise` builtin because go gives me the things unix doesn't
   • pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 15:10:00 JST pistolero

     in reply to
     @vii Oh, shit, yeah? That's pretty cool.
     roko's basilisk likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     roko's basilisk (vii@dsmc.space)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 15:17:29 JST roko's basilisk

     in reply to

     • pistolero
     @p I've wanted to do this for a while, I've kept putting it off but I've thought through a lot of it, so most of what I've been doing is just disambiguating the few places where backwards-compat with POSIX sh requires me to make choices, or just where adding one thing makes the whole parser go a little bit stupid and I have to rearrange things.
     
     You know, fun.
     
     So technically there is a bit of syntactical whitespace. I treat `VAR=value` exactly how POSIX handles assignment, but I treat `pattern = expr` (note the spaces around = ) for elixir-style matching and binding. I have both | and |>. I have the literals #{ and %{ which were so much fun to solve for. Technically, -- is a token because --build was breaking in the shell for a while. I support both `if cond; then ... fi` and `if expr do ... end`. I support atoms, but the POSIX : builtin must be followed by a space.
     
     There's a chance I'm not going to be able to run, say, gentoo scripts through it. I haven't tried yet. But I think my coverage is good enough, and now I have my own shell.
     
     Thank you for listening btw, I always get so self-conscious when I want to talk about these things but no one gets me. I start just shitposting threateningly.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:05:38 JST pistolero

     in reply to
     @vii I ain't talked language design in what feels like *forever*! Thank ye, vi-i.
     
     > most of what I've been doing is just disambiguating the few places where backwards-compat with POSIX sh requires me to make choices, or just where adding one thing makes the whole parser go a little bit stupid and I have to rearrange things
     
     :tomduff: Duff has a smug remark about being able to do BNF for his shell, which Bourne could not; on the other hand, `if not {` is a terrible thing. (Rog Peppe's shell is the nicest shell I have ever used in my life and I will fight Bourne and Korn and Duff and EVEN ROG PEPPE IF HE DISAGREES.)
     
     But I feel you: parser is the hardest part of sh and "superset with clean structural things" is bound to be even harder, especially the type-matching stuff you've done.
     
     > I treat `VAR=value` exactly how POSIX handles assignment, but I treat `pattern = expr` (note the spaces around = ) for elixir-style matching and binding.
     
     That is interesting! When I was doing Cha I actually made function calls syntactic sugar for pattern-matched assignment and then cdr'ing down the body of the function and eval'ing each item in the body. Basically, bindings were callable, so you do `(= b (bind (a 0)))` then `(b 'a)` would return 0, and a lambda was just [binding, arglist, *body] so you could deconstruct lambdas and call them manually:
     
     (bind ((args (arglist-of f))
     (body (body-of f))
     (b ((binding-from f) '(bind))))
     (= b (b 'lpm args l))
     (last (map b body))))
     
     This was also how the object system worked: it was a prototype-based system where you'd do message-passing by evaling a symbol in a binding. You can probably guess how macros worked: they were just lambdas that had no binding attached so they'd use the caller's binding. I haven't crawled that codebase in a minute, I was evidently mad with power because some of the comments were...here is an excerpt:
     
     ; ah ha ha ha...AHAHAHAHAHA
     (= to-bool (compose ! !))
     
     And it meant lambdas/bindings were actually mutable so there was a function for doing a hyperstatic-ish thing (though it only stopped *rebinding*, because `dup` was shallow):
     
     (def seal! b/l
     (shadow 'b)
     (= b (if (binding? b/l) b/l (binding-from b/l)))
     (b '(map shadow (all-syms)))
     b/l)
     (= seal (compose seal! dup))
     
     And while I'm on this tangent, if you'll permit me to indulge a little, there was a file "haskell.cha" that was essentially "fuck haskell lol" that was full of weird macros and one of them I moved into "core.cha" that exploited the pattern-matching on args:
     
     ; So, this was sort of a joke, and it was in haskell.cha, but actually I like it:
     (= \ (macro (*args '-> *body) (list 'lambda args body)))
     ; You can do this: (\ x y -> + x y)
     
     Anyway, now that I've got my old-man reminiscing out of the way, this is a detour around saying that I like what you're doing with pattern-matching.
     
     > I support both `if cond; then ... fi` and `if expr do ... end`. I support atoms, but the POSIX : builtin must be followed by a space.
     
     Fun shit.
     
     > There's a chance I'm not going to be able to run, say, gentoo scripts through it. I haven't tried yet. But I think my coverage is good enough, and now I have my own shell.
     
     Slick shit.
     
     > I want to talk about these things but no one gets me.
     
     I think I get you and I am jazzed.
     
     > I start just shitposting threateningly.
     
     I see no problem.
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: and roko's basilisk like this.
   • Embed this notice
     roko's basilisk (vii@dsmc.space)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:20:52 JST roko's basilisk

     in reply to

     • pistolero
     @p I'm about to pass out in my chair but I deeply appreciated you sharing those sexps, they brought back a lot of memories. And
     
     > ; So, this was sort of a joke, and it was in haskell.cha, but actually I like it:
     > (= \ (macro (*args '-> *body) (list 'lambda args body)))
     > ; You can do this: (\ x y -> + x y)
     
     :ameliayes: this is hilarious, and not just because of haskell but also because of clojure
     
     > I think I get you and I am jazzed.
     
     Thank you for your gettingness, I hope to share this code with you soon.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Radians (demonsixone@poa.st)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:25:15 JST Radians

     in reply to

     • pistolero
     I was a tcsh user for many years for no real reason, maybe someday we can be turbodrunk and calling eachother niggers over our $SH preferences.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:27:30 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Radians
     @DemonSixOne @vii
     
     > I was a tcsh user for many years for no real reason
     
     Default on Solaris; I didn't switch to bournealike until I started running Linux at home and I was a teenager and everyone said how terrible and stupid csh was.
     
     > maybe someday we can be turbodrunk and calling eachother niggers over our $SH preferences.
     
     I WILL FIGHT ANYBODY: https://man.cat-v.org/inferno/1/sh
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:44:31 JST pistolero

     in reply to
     @vii
     
     > I'm about to pass out in my chair but I deeply appreciated you sharing those sexps, they brought back a lot of memories.
     
     I don't have a :mccarthysmug:!
     
     > this is hilarious, and not just because of haskell but also because of clojure
     
     This might actually predate Clojure but I remember seeing their "Here's how we got fewer parens in the language" and being thoroughly unimpressed and then wanting to vomit when I saw what they did with brackets. On the other hand, people besides Rich Hickey use his language. Anyway, I don't know whether Clojure has a thing for that but I ended up using `(= name (\ ... -> ...))` more often than `(def name (...) ...)`.
     
     (Oh, also `...` was a builtin: it was the void function, stolen from...unlambda! `(... x)` would yield `...` for any `x`, and it was named `...` since pattern-matching was a recursive process and you could use it for ignored arguments because it would return non-false/non-nil. So you could get the last element of a list with `(apply (lambda (*... e) e) some-list)`, though of course pattern-matching was slower than just indexing. It was a very fun language but I lost my fascination with Lisp. The language itself was kind of a fever-dream version of CSP-Ruby-Lisp.)
     
     At any rate, does Clojure have some sort of syntax like that?
     
     > Thank you for your gettingness, I hope to share this code with you soon.
     
     :bigbosssalute: I love source code.
     ur_source_code.jpg
     roko's basilisk likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn: (miscbrains@misc.brainsoap.net)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:53:30 JST Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn:

     in reply to

     • Radians
     • pistolero
     @p@fsebugoutzone.org @DemonSixOne@poa.st @vii@dsmc.space csh was default for root on *bsd until quite recently. I used tcsh on my sysv shell account in college. And that carried over into my personal nonsense. I eventually lost it, but ricing out prompts was a fun time.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Radians (demonsixone@poa.st)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:57:21 JST Radians

     in reply to

     • pistolero
     I was a DEC OSF/1 (aka Tru64) user for many years so tcsh/csh and CDE was formative for me.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:58:02 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Radians
     • Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn:
     @miscbrains @DemonSixOne @vii I was on bash when I started to get real about scripting, just in time for people to start yelling at me for bashisms and UUOC.
     
     There was some hilarious copypasta that I wish I could find, the guy was like "Shut the fuck up about me using cat and using backslashes to escape instead of quoting because I live in the moment under the cursor" or something like that.
     
     UUOC is actually a symptom of cognition, same reason postfix calculators were always popular: your mind thinks "object, object, relation". So "I want this file" then "I want this transformation on the file" is a natural way to think. I refuse to stop cat'ing files into awk.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 16:59:04 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Radians
     @DemonSixOne @vii Ha, I was envious of the guys that were allowed to touch the Solaris boxes; I was stuck telnetting into them from the Windows 95 machine like a fucking pleb. (Was very pleased to use pine to check my email.)
   • Embed this notice
     Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn: (miscbrains@misc.brainsoap.net)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 17:51:46 JST Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn:

     in reply to

     • Radians
     • pistolero
     @p@fsebugoutzone.org @DemonSixOne@poa.st @vii@dsmc.space There's definitely some group think consensus going that took over. csh and co were definitely scriptable as well, or i wouldn't have had tomes dedicated to them back in the day.
     
     Whatever the case, they lost out. I still use those shells locally:
     because I don't give a fuck,
     familiarity,
     and the scripting i'm generally doing is pretty low key.
     
     ctrl d as an autocomplete still haunts me whenever i use another shell.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 17:54:34 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Radians
     • Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn:
     @miscbrains @DemonSixOne @vii
     
     > ctrl d as an autocomplete still haunts me whenever i use another shell.
     
     Ah, holy fucking shit, ha. Autocomplete in rio/acme is ^F, luckily doesn't mess me up elsewhere.
   • Embed this notice
     Radians (demonsixone@poa.st)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 17:58:30 JST Radians

     in reply to

     • pistolero
     my desktop in those years was a Alpha EV56 (666MHz) with a FireGL gpu, was legit stomping anything that the i386 world was doing at the time.
     
     pine UI was terrible, i was rocking mutt in that era.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn: (miscbrains@misc.brainsoap.net)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 18:02:37 JST Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn:

     in reply to

     • Radians
     • pistolero
     @p@fsebugoutzone.org @DemonSixOne@poa.st @vii@dsmc.space also as the ancient text decree. It's not fucking elm.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn: (miscbrains@misc.brainsoap.net)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 18:02:38 JST Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn:

     in reply to

     • Radians
     • pistolero
     @p@fsebugoutzone.org @DemonSixOne@poa.st @vii@dsmc.space pine was a very fine email client.
     I'm very opinionated about nn being the best usenet client though.
     pistolero likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 18-Apr-2026 18:06:13 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Radians
     @DemonSixOne @vii
     
     > my desktop in those years was a Alpha EV56 (666MHz) with a FireGL gpu, was legit stomping anything that the i386 world was doing at the time.
     
     This was pretty fascinating.
     
     https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/a-history-of-arm-part-1-building-the-first-chip/
     https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/a-history-of-arm-part-2-everything-starts-to-come-together/
     https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/a-history-of-arm-part-3-coming-full-circle/
     
     The Alpha was cool. I bought a dead one for $6 but couldn't get it to run properly.
     
     > pine UI was terrible, i was rocking mutt in that era.
     
     I was barely able to do Unix at the time; I was babby.