Genesis: an interpreted, Turing-complete Paleo-Hebrew programming language | Hacker News Reader

Genesis: an interpreted, Turing-complete Paleo-Hebrew programming language

github.com

157 pointsu864 comments

Oh, this is Heaven!

As I represent a unique intersection of Christian, linguist/philologist, and computer geek, this was clearly designed to appeal to my precise demographic.

Now, I don't program anymore, but according to the FAQ, that does not disqualify me from enjoying this project!

Are you... Larry Wall?

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

Honestly, every third Christian I know is a linguist/computer geek.

I’m an atheist, lol, but I still geek out on biblical archeology and ancient languages.

But how many can read Paleo-Hebrew?

I believe the gauntlet has been thrown down here. The challenge is not merely to read it, but to write it fluently enough to develop nifty code. Just read the FAQ! And Paleo-Hebrew fluency may not be the foremost obstacle — the numbering system is arcane and downright hostile to Westerners!

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone turns this into a Perl dialect along the same lines as Lingua::Romana::Perligata.

> the Bible explicitly forbids object worship

Strange, even sinful, to write this interpreter in Java then.

There's a loophole for everything.

Strange to take the effort regarding paleo-Hebrew, but not use it with Yahweh's (𐤉𐤄𐤅𐤄) name in the title. Guess a Cohen will fork it.

But you're not supposed to take the name of the Lord in main().

Just make sure that no other variables like any blasphemous globals are declared before the one true declaration. (Returning false anonymous) nested functions, which may cause side effects, seem necessary unless the interpretation is such that the only implementation is near to the one combinator basis https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.19.....

You can't say the Tetragrammaton out loud though.

Personally I find it hilarious that apparently in more than one case the common Hebrew spelling of YHWH, יהוה, was wrongly understood or just misspelled as πιπι (pee-pee) in Greek texts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton

Then don't say it or substitute "my lord" when spoken. No prohibition against it writing it.

That's correct, but my comment was basically an indirect suggestion of using peepee as a syntax keyword or language name.

In Orthodox Judaism there is also a rule against erasing or defacing names of God (instead, you're supposed to bury them in a cemetery).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genizah

That also then generates a reason to try to avoid writing these names unnecessarily, because using them unnecessarily increases the chance that someone will deface them, or creates extra material that has to be disposed of carefully.

The "rule" or concept appears in BT Shabbat 115a, which directs that holy writings in other than the <Hebrew and Greek languages> (Targum) require "Genizah" that is, preservation: https://www.jewish-funerals.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/J.... This appears to be in Hebrew and remaining electronic leaves nothing to bury.

I would have thought Forth would be a better fit for such a language.

"Therefore the LORD God sent him Forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken."

Need a language named “multiply” so we can quine Go, Forth, and Multiply.

When you actually read the keywords things like "function" are taken from Modern Hebrew "funktzia" - so an ancient Hebrew wouldn't understand it

But I doubt you could even think about a programming language for ancient Hebrews

Should've been re-derived from ‘fungor’ or whatever.

For those who are commenting about TempleOS... I think this project has too much self-awareness to cause a real schism

From FAQ: > Why not use Modern Hebrew?

> If you are able to program in this language, I have failed.

> Why are you running an interpreted language over an interpreted language?

> "Wherefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned" 4

Gematria number system is a comparatively modern invention. Researching the old weights, measures, and coins of Israel show good evidence that the Egyptian number system was used, which is a somewhat decimal numbering system. Would be very cool if this language used the ancient Egyptian number system instead of this new-fangled gematria stuff. Then the numbers would be visually very distinct as well.

> somewhat decimal

That sounds very suspicious.

I would try it, but I'm afraid someone would point out that I'm mistakenly coding in Paleo-Klingon...

Looks really cool, but if God wrote all of us in Java then that explains a lot more than the bible does...

I’d definitely be a NullPointerException. I don’t want a programming language that I can’t type in ascii. Sorry, god. Limited to 255.

Yep, rewrite it in Rust please. I hate having to pause for garbage collection every night.

The only reasonable substrate for this is Brainfuck.

That’s why there’s a sabbath

For me the Sabbath is a recompile with bug fixes. When I'm GCing every night, at least someone can ring me in an emergency. The phone is off for Sabbath.

And I'm not joking about the bugfixes. A day off of _everything_ is a great way to reflect on the past six days, and to learn from them. I'm certain that my ostensibly-six-day-week is more productive than my seven-day-week ever was.

I imagine many people here know the song "The Eternal Flame".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-OjTPj7K54

I personally have a lot of boilerplate that seems redundant.

There are errors throughout the documentation.

E.g. 5782 = 𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤒𐤐״𐤁

when clearly it should be 𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤕𐤒𐤐״𐤁

Clearly!

That's the phoenician alphabet, paleo hebrew does not have a unicode block yet

excuse me but have you considered the value of a really good nam-shub? the compilation step is a bit of a doozy, but the payoff is really something!

> fixed-length array

Back to atheism for me.

Ok, waiting for cuneiform now

Have to first make the clay tablets to feed into the punched reader.

With sexagesimal numerals.

What about HolyC? Actually How is HolyC in the eyes of language engineers?

Shouldn't this be named 𐤁𐤓𐤀𐤔𐤉𐤈 ?

You probably meant 𐤁𐤓𐤀𐤔𐤉𐤕.

Side note: to a Jew, this obsession of Christians over Hebrew and Biblical things feels rather... creepy - although I can't quite rationalise it.

Jesus' programming language？

I incanted: “ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON-MIRAKOI-KALANIEMI-TSHANA-KAI-KAI-EPHSANDER-GALISDO-TAHUN…” and just as I finished, my timer reached zero and told me I was finished, for today, free until tomorrow morning crashed down on me and I started the same thing all over again.

“Meh,” I said. “Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh.”

I was a little nervous about the performance aspects of a scripting language, but Sapphires on Paths just made getting to an MVP universe so much easier

See: https://unsongbook.com/

Terry A. Davis vibes?

He had divine intellect and was chosen to build god's temple.

https://youtu.be/ACAQBMSioOg

God's language is HolyC.

You can embed a realistic elephant in HolyC.

You can also write chess software to play against god.

Great, now we’re going to have a schism…

HolyC++ ?

> If you are able to program in this language, I have failed.

Where's TempleOS when you need him? looks up into the sky

I can already see him getting banned from this thread