Cyberscript

(cyberscript.dev)

15 points | by dtj1123 3 hours ago

5 comments

  • SchizoDuckie 45 minutes ago
    This is by far the most stupid name for a new language imaginable. Shortening it to "cyber" on the landing page too..

    When will devs learn that being able to search for a term on the open internet without having it polluted by normal language is kind of important

    • jhbadger 16 minutes ago
      Google's Go has made finding info on the ancient Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name Go difficult. This has has interestingly lead to increased use of its original name Weiqi or its Korean name Baduk.
      • koito17 13 minutes ago
        The Japanese name is actually 囲碁 (igo). 碁 (go) is just an abbreviation; I don't see it often in Japanese text, but for some reason the Anglosphere decided to adopt it.

        囲 is a simplification of 圍, and 碁 is a Japanese-specific letter that roughly maps to 棋. If you read 圍棋 in Chinese, you get weiqi.

    • ModernMech 12 minutes ago
      Devs will never learn this because naming languages after common words is exactly the PL dev culture. It's not important to pldevs because they know the median number of users for a pl is 0, large companies know they can buy the search results, so names are chosen for reasons other than SEO.

      People get around it by appending "-lang" or "-script" to the name and that solves the SEO.

    • tjpnz 37 minutes ago
      In the 90s/2000s people also used to shorten cybersex to cyber. I guess if they wanted to have fun with it they could add a "Wanna Cyber?" in place of the usual "Try <x>".
      • josephg 24 minutes ago
        It drove me nuts in the cryptocurrency boom that people shortened cryptocurrency to "crypto". As in, "I'm into crypto" or "I work in crypto".

        Cryptography is much older than bitcoin.

  • Altern4tiveAcc 14 minutes ago
    It would be nice if the examples included an integration with an existing game engine. Game scripting is a very common use case for those languages.
  • tosti 47 minutes ago
    My gripe with new languages like this is that strings are always UTF-8 and that makes it needlessly difficult to parse HTTP headers correctly. This has led to vulnerabilities in the past.
    • josephg 12 minutes ago
      I disagree. UTF-8 is the right default. Pure ASCII strings are rarely needed in modern software. Unless you know that you need ASCII, your strings should support unicode.
    • bflesch 41 minutes ago
      I agree. At this point scripting languages should have native support for string subtypes with custom charsets (ascii/utf16) or just regexp-defined or even ENUM()'erated values.

      IIRC historically on Windows, a string was UTF16, on unix it was ASCII; nowadays everywhere it's UTF8 without a way to specifically limit what goes into a string.

      For example UTF8 opens the door to homoglyph attacks and various other things (RTL, spaces), and a program should be able to force a string to be ASCII-only so that these classes of problems are ruled out.

      • Georgelemental 8 minutes ago
        Homoglyph attacks and RTL work just as well in UTF-16. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are different character encodings for the same character set (Unicode).

        That being said, Windows permits unpaired surrogates in its "UTF-16" strings, even though that is not actually valid UTF-16. Similarly, many Linux APIs accept arbitrary bytes, not just valid UTF-8.

        • bflesch 4 minutes ago
          Of course. I was trying to say that it would be nice to limit certain variables to an ASCII charset, or ASCII+umlaut+accents without any of the 10k other UTF8 shenanigans.
      • tosti 25 minutes ago
        The NT kernel predates UTF8 by at least 3 years. It originally used UCS2, which covers the basic multilingual plane of the first unicode standard.
  • eterm 52 minutes ago
    The benchmarking seems a little bit suspect.

    It links to the bench.cy, but nothing explains how the others were measured. It seems that they're including some start-up time in some that dominates, but not explaining whether it's realistic to be needing to spend that.

  • als0 1 hour ago
    Seems to be in the same category as Lua. Can a PL nerd explain what's different about it?