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Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

Fun idea, but inline scripting only works for the simplest things. I could write my handlers inline with JS as well, but I really would rather not.

Maybe a bigger question is why not have this as a JS library, but its own language. Because it's kind of almost there (here using jQuery):

    <button _="on click toggle .big-text">
      Toggle the "big-text" class on me on click
    </button>

    <button onclick="$(this).toggleClass('big-text')">
      Toggle the "big-text" class on me on click
    </button>

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With just vanilla JS, it's actually shorter, so yes. It has very limited use

  <button onclick="this.classList.toggle('big-text')">
    Toggle the "big-text" class on me on click
  </button>

the on* attributes only handle the standard DOM events, and I wanted a way to write inline handlers for the custom events fired by htmx

then I realized I didn't want to deal w/ async/await or setTimeout, and off I went...

The pattern used here: "foo then bar" is identical to JS promises, I notice. Of course, it's more elegant when you don't have to wrap it in functions. But it hardly warrants an entire language I think.

the "then" isn't necessary: it's an optional bit of syntax taken from HyperTalk, equivalent to the optional semi-colon in javascript

for async transparency the hyperscript runtime looks at the results of every expression and, if it is a promise, resolves the promise before allowing the parent expression to continue evaluating

so you don't actually need to think about (or know) if an expression returns a promise or not, the runtime takes care of it for you, a very unique feature that does require a runtime. And if I'm gonna make a runtime, I'm gonna make a language too

it's also slow as molasses, if you are trying to write a bitcoin miner, for example

but for front end scripting, it usually doesn't matter and the convenience is worth the runtime costs

at least that's the theory

lets find out

It’ll help people understand the language if you remove optional words tbh. Hypertalk is HyperTalk, but the world isn’t written in it for a reason. Good luck. Btw Lua is also implicitly async like this as well.

oh, it gets worse: not only is "then" optional, but "the" is also optional in many places:

  set the window's location to the target's href

and note the "'s" possessive expression

hyperscript is a funky language, for sure :)

Can you link me to some docs on the lua's transparent concurrency model? All my searches are turning up explicit concurrency stuff. Hyperscript is unique (as far as I know) in that it resolves asynchronicity (Promises) at the expression level, without explicit syntax.

I could guess about "the". But seriously, this is much clearer:

"set window location to target href"

And this is even clearer:

"window.location = target.href"

Adding the flourishes of human language is kinda cute, It can also be useful in speech recognition when we can't help but speak like we normallt speak. But code is a written specification, and specifications benefit from being clear, succinct, and for there to be "one clear & right way" of doing something.

Just my take.

Regarding Lua async-by-default execution:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49764681/how-exactly-doe...

hmm, the responses there make it look like lua has co-routines (which are explicit) and are async-transparent when calling C++ functions, but not generally implicit like hyperscript

so, a step in the right direction, but not a fully async-transparent runtime like hyperscript

thank you for the link

Of course at the lowest level it's "explicit" as in you see the API used to implement it.

But in practice there's nothing explicit about it, because any function can yield and you don't have to explicitly know it did.

Lua is heavily used to script games, and you can see scripts like this there:

   walkTo(desk)
   pause(3);
   turn(180);
   say("I changed my mind, can I come with you?")
   response = promptPlayer("OK, come", "No, stay");
   ...
   ...

Notice that every single one of those commands is not instant. It takes some time for it to happen, there's animation, user prompts, and so on.

All of this is happening async. But you don't have to do anything about it. You're writing a function, and the API for it yields where it has to. For you, all that's implicit.

It's literally identical to yours in practice, but it doesn't return promises. It yields natively.

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