Show HN: Spade, A simple programming language with a TUI IDE | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Spade, A simple programming language with a TUI IDE

hackage.haskell.org

70 pointssras-me20 comments

Looks neat, kinda reminds me of a cross between QBASIC and Turbo BASIC.

I tried it a bit but found a few issues:

1. The about box doesn't seem to use the current term size - it appears out of bounds in 80x24 (which is my default term size).

2. In help, the down arrow key with the cursor on first green letter moves the cursor right. If the cursor is in some other place it hides the cursor.

3. There should be some mouse support, especially in help as it is much easier to point and click on links than navigate the cursor.

4. On the topic on navigation, page up/down should work in help as it makes easier to skim it and skip sections (also IMO sections should be in individual pages instead of having everything mashed together). Tab should also jump the cursor to the next link.

5. Trying to copy and paste an example from help (the first example in graphics, the one with the "graphicswindow(500, 500)", "wait(5)", etc) crashed the program with some out of bounds error. This happened twice but for some reason it didn't happen a third time - not sure what i did different.

6. (after it worked) the example runs but if it exits and i try to run it a second time the IDE disappears (the term goes black with the cursor at the top left) and it hangs - i had to kill it with killall spade)

7. Pasting works from the X clipboard but trying to copy something (doesn't matter if i use Edit->Copy or just select it) doesn't work.

8. Code completion window appears even with single value even after the complete value is written (e.g. if i type break i still get the code completion with a single break value that remains there until i press enter). This isn't really helpful and is annoying. Also it should be possible to "complete" with tab instead of just enter as tab completion is very common.

9. The tab key doesn't seem to work in general.

10. The delete key doesn't seem to work on selected text.

11. Selection seems to work weirdly if i select backwards with Shift+Left arrow - the selection is always in the letters at the left and side of the cursor and the entire line from the end of the selection to the end of the line becomes gray (however Shift+Home works as expected).

12. Not a bug, but IMO errors should move the cursor to the error line and be a little more human friendly than "Expecting some of FunctionStatement but got Token {tkRaw = TkKeyword KwEndIf, TkLocation = Location {lcLine = 6, lcColumn = 3, lcOffset = 237}, tkOffsetEnd" :-P

Very nice of you to give it a try, and sorry for all the issues. Some of these are known, but most of them are not. So thanks for all the details!

> Looks neat, kinda reminds me of a cross between QBASIC and Turbo BASIC.

I was going just to look at the comments and probably neglect to click through to the actual language, but it's hard for me to imagine a recommendation that would tweak my nostalgia better than this. (Anyone remember the heady days of entering games like SNAKE.BAS into QBasic by manually transcribing a magazine print-out?) Thanks!

I found the development environment extremely elegant, in the true sense of the word: it takes away everything superfluous until only the necessary remains.

You would love Turbo Pascal 3.0,

https://olimex.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/turbo-pascal-3-0-run...

FreePascal is way more modern and still has TUI IDE

If that was the point I would have linked the Turbo Pascal 6.0 Turbo Vision based IDE.

I linked the TP 3 due to the minimalist remark.

FWIW this isn't really TP3, just a skin over a vaguely TP-like compiler - the first thing i did when i pressed E was to type Ctrl+K D to exit the editor and it just focused Firefox's location bar :-P. Then i noticed it was just a regular textarea editor.

But it is indeed a neat minimalistic environment. I used it in a video ~10 years ago to make a simple text based game (i was pretty much improvising the entire thing while i was writing it :-P):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYwHQpvMZTE

Of course it isn't, I could as well just have mentioned TP 3.0 and leave it there.

However I bothered to try to find out something to show to others.

TP 3.0 was my first Turbo Pascal, I had floppy with it alongside MS-DOS 3.3, to carry around into highschool computer lab.

Reminiscent of QBasic for me. Well done! Looking forward to more development.

Great! Would be nice to have a Turbo Pascal skin.

the searchable help feature is awesome

Just letting you know SPADE is the name of pretty well known algorithm for frequent sequence mining

https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Data_Mining_Algorithms_In_R/...

Just letting you know, it's also the name of a pretty well known gardening/farming implement that humanity has been using for thousands of years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spade

Just letting you know, it's also the name of a pretty well-known suit of cards present in decks of playing cards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spades_(suit)

Just letting you know Ace of Spades is a great motorhead song.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_of_Spades_(song)

Just letting you know Ace of Spades was really cool voxel-based shooter game that was later remade in a terrible commercial version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_of_Spades_(video_game)

(And of course, it has modern community ports https://www.buildandshoot.com/)

Just letting you know, it's also a very derogatory racist term.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spade

It's worth knowing that the name you chose for something is used in something (midly) related - being aware let's you disambiguate if/when the need arises. I was not suggesting a name change.

That said - please don't turn HN into reddit. Joke chains detract and distract from the topic

I consider it meta commentary at some point - nobody can show off anything without hearing of unrelated, obscure projects.

I was hoping the sarcasm would lead to some larger discussion of naming collisions. The sarcasm was to simply point out that this name already has a tremendous naming collision, with a farming implement we've been using for thousands of years - you can't get any more ridiculous than that.

I think when it comes to naming collisions, we should call a spade a spade, after all...

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