subscript

At the MapBox office, we have a saying for certain kinds of creations. When you veer too close reinventing a wheel, you say

‘what the world really needs is a template language written by me’

or a test framework, programming language, MVC framework, and so on. For the most part, we embrace this ideology: we think in terms of solutions, not new gizmos. There’s no CoffeeScript, no LeSS, no Jade, no obsession over node.js flow control tricks, and so on.

I wrote a language, because what the world really needs is a language written by me.

subscript is a lisp-style language in the pattern of little lisp.

subscript(['+', 1, 2]) // => 3

subscript has an interpreter, like little lisp. It isn’t compiled to JavaScript, like CoffeeScript or TypeScript, instead the code is interpreted and evaluated.

subscript(JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(["+", 1, 2]))) // => 3

subscript doesn’t have a parser. That’s because it’s JSON, the standardized, lightweight data format with parsers and serializers available pretty much anywhere.

subscript(['let', [['x', 42]], 'x']); // => 42

subscript can’t do everything javascript can. This is on purpose: it is meant to be strict, controlled, and free of windows to evil, like eval and its brethren.

subscript is a lisp because that was easy. This is my first real language project and the idea of lisp is like the piano to C’s guitar: only one key per tone, but a little harder to play.

Why? A few things.

What You Code When You Draw Algorithms

I can’t stop thinking about visual programming and accessibility, about the promise and mystery of vvvv and learnable programming and the semi-see-through code of mistakes.io.

But being relentlessly focused on working code to a significant, somewhat crippling fault makes me think about what you’re really writing: when you design the algorithm by drawing, when you teach a computer how to think, what is the artifact, if not UTF8 text that tells V8 what to do?

In this case, subscript is a first shot at a homoiconic language that should be straightforward to manipulate, as a working program, from other working programs.

What You Code When You Write Rules

Having worked on ‘rule’ or ‘stylesheet’ languages before in the context of CartoCSS, and having some future of thinking about them again, along with the other rare beasts of template languages, it makes you think about the nearly-software that you’re writing by proxy. See Considering CSS for the last edition of this idea.

Security through Simplicity

Javascript is an attack vector: it’s littered with tabnabbing, XSS, JSONP hacks, stealing cookies and using client-side storage for nefarious ends. I’ve tried to contain it before and needed take a serious axe to some functionality to ensure even a little bit of safety.

But on the other hand, shared logic could be so useful in quite a few places: what if maps could share their projection code? If templates could export self-bootstrapping, safe functions? If online games could support flexible scripting like desktop games do with Lua?

Whether it’s bulletproof: I don’t know. Try writing an exploit in pure subscript, assuming that all implementations will do a JSON.parse(JSON.stringify()) cycle to ensure their input is pure.

First

This is my first language. It’s simple, little more than a riff on Mary’s cool project. From here, meta-programming eureka perhaps.