Show HN: The Blots Programming Language
blots-lang.orgI've been working on this small, slightly weird expression-oriented programming language for a little while now and feel ready to share it with others. I use it pretty often now in my day-to-day and work life, as a scratchpad for doing a bit of quick math or picking some pieces of data out of a JSON payload.
Would really appreciate any feedback about the syntax, docs, features that are glaringly missing, etc. Before anybody mentions it: I know the performance is pretty lousy when dealing with a lot of data. If you can believe it, the runtime is about 100x faster than it used to be! Long term I'd like to switch to a proper bytecode interpreter, but so far performance has been Good Enough for my use cases.
Thanks for taking a look!
Super cool! I’ve always wanted to make my own lil language and I’ve always been too intimidated to try.
What would you say is a benefit of using this over using jq?
Good question! Personally, I don't often reach for jq as I've never really taken the time to get comfortable with its syntax. Obviously I can now have an LLM generate me a jq command that'll do what I want, but I'd prefer to be able to at least visually scan the suggested implementation to make sure it actually does the thing I want before I go and run it.
More broadly, a lot of other command line utils for transforming input have such an emphasis on terseness that I sort of bounce off of them. awk and sed and jq are all super powerful tools, but I wanted a tool that had a more balanced trade-off of characters vs. clarity.