Comment by surprisetalk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by surprisetalk | Hacker News Reader

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Great questions and observations!

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> Why did you feel the need to create a new language?

Well when I started on this language in 2017-2019(?), I definitely wasn't aware of Unison.

I remember talking to Richard Feldman about scrapscript when he first started working on Roc (fun fact: I was the first person Feldman added to the private repo!).

I spent a long time on the initial Scrapscript implementations, trying to compete in some similar applications as Roc, and Feldman just absolutely crushed it. I felt (and still feel) that Roc is doing a great job at the low-level "platform" experience I yearn for.

[1] https://www.roc-lang.org/

Eventually I met some Unison folks at Strange Loop (2019?), and we had very different inspirations and goals. That seems to still be the case.

There are some hard-to-articulate things I want out of the web, and Unison's architecture doesn't seem suited for it.

Anyway, Scrapscript only got a bunch of attention a year or two when I started working on it in public a bit more. I think defeating alcoholism also made me much more productive haha

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> How do the languages compare?

From what I understand, Unison has very little in common with Scrapscript.

"Content-addressibilty" is really more of a mechanism than a "feature". Kinda like how AI is not really a "feature". You can't just sprinkle SHA on something and go raise venture capital haha

I think one major difference is that Unison opted for a more traditional git-based paradigm and then built some stellar dev tools on top of that. So far, Scrapscript is a bit more ambitious in its plans.

So go try out Unison! And come back and play with Scrapscript too, when it's more mature :)

> From what I understand, Unison has very little in common with Scrapscript.

I think you should read up on Unison a bit more, I see a lot of overlap.

Both identify code with hashes, and implement code sharing through hash based syncing. Builtin serialization is also present in both, and both are very Haskell inspired.

One difference I see is the sharing mechanism, where Unison has a local sqlite repository and tooling for uploading, while Scrapscript seems to be built more around IPFS. But that seems like an implementation detail rather than a fundemantal difference.

Unison supports algebraic effects, aka abilities with handlers, which is a much more powerful and general concept than the platforms in Roc.

I think ergonomics and practicality could use more consideration when discussing new languages. A language exists in an ecosystem.

At a glance to me, Scrapscript looks very traditional and easy to grok from a regular programmers perspective, there are build steps, you can use an IDE or editor etc.

Unison feels more like "Smalltalk Squeak" and Scrapscript feels more like "GNU Smalltalk". Come live in our new world, or integrate new stuff into your existing world kind of vibe.

Congrats on all the impressive progress!

Can't sprinkle SHA on something and raise venture capital? Ahem, behold Bitcoin. :)

Bitcoin was not VC funded

... but a bunch of companies were, and a lot of the claims about what web3 was going to be were really vague

> I think defeating alcoholism also made me much more productive haha

Just out of curiosity and because we all have different limits - how much do you think you used to drink, generally, and what helped you quit?

Before I quit, it was ~6 drinks per day minimum.

Here's the essay I wrote when I decided to quit:

[1] https://taylor.town/1000-weekends

Here was my 8-week progress report:

[2] https://taylor.town/8-weekends

Right now I'm 96 weeks in! Going great!

If you need any support/encouragement, always feel free to email me at hello@taylor.town :)

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