Retina: A regex-based recreational programming language

I can't find any page by Colagioia about Thue, so I can't say if he was the originator of this trend, but it's a shame not to see any mention of the origin of the name Thue on the esolang page. He was quite a mathematician; he originated the systematic study of string-rewriting systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Thue_system and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thue–Morse_sequence), which is why this name is appropriate, but made lots of other contributions, too—as a number theorist, I know him from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roth%27s_theorem (which Wikipedia calls Roth's theorem, but which I think most number theorists call the Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem).

There seems to be a couple of examples but the UX for discovering them is a bit poor. Author could do a better job surfacing them up front instead.

In the meantime, here is where you can find them:

- Online editor has a "Hello World" button that loads a very basic example

- https://github.com/m-ender/retina/tree/master/Examples has a bunch of more example, linked from the landing page

- https://github.com/m-ender/retina/wiki/The-Language shows the entire language (AFAIK), but it's a reference.

Hi, author here! Thanks for the feedback. I'm not in charge of Try It Online, so I can't do anything about filling it with code by default, but as someone else noted, there is a Hello World button, which fills in a (very trivial) snippet.

There also a bunch of examples with tutorial-like explanation in the Examples folder.

I'll think about adding one example to the main README though, just to really put people off of looking further into the language. ;)

While I'm here, in case anyone does actually use the language and find it to be useful, I also wrote a VS Code extension that lets you use it as a powerful search-and-replace alternative: https://github.com/m-ender/vscode-retinate

FWIW, they're usually called esoteric programming languages/esolangs, but I'm not a fan of that term. That's why I've been using "recretional" instead. :)

It looks to me like it's very similar to a subset of sed, but with a more powerful regex library. But many programs in this language probably have near line-for-line translations into sed if they don't use newer regex features.

A lot of people (including me) have basically only learned the s command in sed and don't usually think about all of the more sophisticated sed features.

Yeah, it really is surprisingly similar to sed. "Surprisingly", because when I first designed the language I knew nothing about sed, and I still know very little (but I've seen people convert programs between both languages in a fairly straightforward manner).

Appreciate the compliment. :)

Exactly. The author is active on the Code Golf Stack Exchange and wrote this programming language with code golding in mind, which is viewed as relaxing by some.

Yeah, that was the idea. Just a language for fun and specifically for code golf (solving programming problems in as small a program as possible). In the case of Retina, it turned out the language is actually pretty useful for throwaway scripts for string manipulation, so I actually am using the language while working occasionally, but that was definitely not a design goal. :D