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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

If you think that it is just a sick joke, take a look at this and think again: http://www.zifyoip.com/wysiscript/sigbovik.html

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"Since each variable has a corresponding color, assignment is easily represented with background colors. For instance, A denotes the assignment of the number 12345⅔ to the variable #F00BA2. Note that this could also be written as rm -rf /, because we are removing the arbitrary indirect association between text and meaning to focus only on the clear meaning conveyed by the formatting."

"Programming languages have not always been text-based. Early work explored many diverse paradigms. For example, the first widely used programming language, Build-A-New-Machine-For-Each-Task, did not employ text at all, nor did its popular successor, Plug-Wires-Into-Different-Places."

The paper's date is March 31st, so that it can be read on April 1st....

I do not exclude nothing weird since learning that indentation is a structural part of Python. I was convinced that it is just a joke, first. Now I am just sad.

> I do not exclude nothing weird since learning that indentation is a structural part of Python.

That is not that weird. In fact a more formal (and optional) version (the "offside rule", which is what Haskell uses) was part of Landin's Iꜱᴡɪᴍ:

> (c) Indentation, used to indicate program structure. A physical Iꜱᴡɪᴍ can be defined in terms of an unspecified parameter: a subset of phrase categories, instances of which are restricted in layout by the following rule called "the offside rule." The southeast quadrant that just contains the phrase's first symbol must contain the entire phrase, except possibly for bracketed subsegments. This rule has three important features. It is based on vertical alignment, not character width, and hence is equally appropriate in handwritten, typeset or typed texts. Its use is not obligatory, and use of it can be mixed freely with more conventional alternatives like punctuation. Also, it is incorporated in Iꜱᴡɪᴍ in a systematic way that admits of alternatives without changing other features of Iꜱᴡɪᴍ and that can be applied to other languages.

> I was convinced that it is just a joke, first. Now I am just sad.

There is at least one language which "seriously" attempted this though: : color forth ; (which should properly be written colorForth with a red "color" and a green "forth": https://web.archive.org/web/20160310135832/http://colorforth...).

Using visual/presentation elements for functional meaning is pretty weird. Regardless of being alone with it or not.

If you consider the long and rich history of computing, Python is not uncommon. Just an example: in COBOL, the 7th character of a line has special meaning, for example, comments must begin at the 7th character. Code body usually starts at the 8th character of a line. If you don't follows these rules, compiler won't accept your code. It makes sense when you consider that COBOL was initially written on punchcards.

That reminds me of Bjarne Stroustrup's April Fools's paper on overloading whitespace:

http://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

looks like an obvious evolution of colorForth[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth

I am disappointed that the references at the end are made up and are not the prior art in the obviously important field of non-textual languages. I'd really love to learn about that "system for aromatic computation and its applications in cheese production [7]"!

That one is also a joke. There was another SIGBOVIK paper on the front page a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057168

Are you suggesting that this paper is in earnest? O.o

http://www.sigbovik.org/

Tom 7's video descriptions mention this conference, he has quite a few fun topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDxjbXAqTPg

No, GP means "if you think this is a sick joke, look what's actually sick".

Oh right, 'this joke's even sicker'. Thanks, it's been a long day.

Well I really meant that someone is trying to make this sick joke reality, but I like this explanation.

Ah, SIGBOVIK. So many amazing papers come out of that. My favorites are often by Tom7, see for example http://tom7.org/mario/mario.pdf or http://tom7.org/abc

Can't trust anyone who uses wall-to-wall justification.

Nothing new here. I've see programmers that basically use x for everything

WysiScript ie. "what you see is Script", smart word play with the acronym well known in the industry. What we are missing now is WYSYMNG editor ("what you see you might not get", see Beastie Boys song).

Curious... I can't figure out if this is completely serious. There are what are either tongue in cheek remarks, or they are taking themselves very seriously...

> "removing the awkward necessity of writing text"

> "as powerful as other languages and significantly more colorful"

> "we believe it will appeal to many types of students who may not have an interest in traditional text-based programming, including painters, graphic designers, and the illiterate."

I think it might be more effective to teach the illiterate to read first rather than code... Maybe it's worth it if learning to code inspires them to become literate?

> I can't figure out if this is completely serious.

"Most programming languages in use today use only a single color for all numeric literals, which is unnecessarily confusing and makes it impossible to distinguish different numbers using only a spectrometer"

“Future versions of the language may relax this restriction by adding support for additional colors not representable in RGB, such as ultraviolet, infrared, and plaid.”

Seems legit.

> In order to support quantum computing, which makes use of value superposition and probabilistic algorithms, future versions of WysiScript may make use of the alpha channel in color specifications.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're not entirely serious.

Sigbovik is a joke journal. A very serious and very good joke journal.

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