> Is this meant to be understood by geniuses or something?
Nope; anyone who has some basic programming knowledge and perhaps a high level understanding about how different programming languages work. And the ability to connect some dots together. I'm old enough to have learned BASIC programming on an Apple II and took Pascal in college, which is the extent of my formal programming training.
> “it’s JSON with types and functions and hashed references”
Another way to say this: it's executable YAML, which is a strict superset of JSON [1]. I like YAML, so that's what came to mind when looking at ScrapScript code. I also like clean, minimal syntax when I can get it, like YAML, CoffeeScript or Haml.
> “it’s a language with a weird IPFS thing”
I’ve been playing with IPFS [2] since its early days in 2015, though not much recently, though this will probably get me back into it. Content addressing solves a lot of problems that I won’t get into here but it’s certainly not that hard to grasp. IPFS is available for pretty much every browser these days and is integrated into the Brave browser [3].
> all programs are data
This concept has been around since the creation of Lisp in the 1950's. This enables all kinds of cool features the computer science types get excited about. I've known about this concept since the 80's when I used to teach kids Logo (which is a Lisp). The term used nowadays is homoiconicity [4] but that term wasn't in widespread use until fairly recently.
Bottom line: ScrapScript sounds very interesting and I'm looking forward to checking it out.
Nope; anyone who has some basic programming knowledge and perhaps a high level understanding about how different programming languages work. And the ability to connect some dots together. I'm old enough to have learned BASIC programming on an Apple II and took Pascal in college, which is the extent of my formal programming training.
> “it’s JSON with types and functions and hashed references”
Another way to say this: it's executable YAML, which is a strict superset of JSON [1]. I like YAML, so that's what came to mind when looking at ScrapScript code. I also like clean, minimal syntax when I can get it, like YAML, CoffeeScript or Haml.
> “it’s a language with a weird IPFS thing”
I’ve been playing with IPFS [2] since its early days in 2015, though not much recently, though this will probably get me back into it. Content addressing solves a lot of problems that I won’t get into here but it’s certainly not that hard to grasp. IPFS is available for pretty much every browser these days and is integrated into the Brave browser [3].
> all programs are data
This concept has been around since the creation of Lisp in the 1950's. This enables all kinds of cool features the computer science types get excited about. I've known about this concept since the 80's when I used to teach kids Logo (which is a Lisp). The term used nowadays is homoiconicity [4] but that term wasn't in widespread use until fairly recently.
Bottom line: ScrapScript sounds very interesting and I'm looking forward to checking it out.
[1]: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/#12-yaml-history
[2]: https://ipfs.tech
[3]: https://brave.com/brave-integrates-ipfs/
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity