vito / dash

dash

go run ./cmd/dash git.dash

an experimental scripting language for Dagger

philosophy

• keep it simple, don't pay 1000 homages to 1000 languages
  • don't be afraid to be different
  • don't be afraid to be the same
• take the good parts of Bash
  • it's the "language" tackling the most similar domain
    • almost every language sucks for quickly scripting commands
  • examples:
    • use # for comments
    • write commands $ like this; ["not", "like", "this"]
• favor ergonomics over purity
  • use keywords (e.g. def) to make it easier to walk through the file using tags/etc.
  • make things look different if they are interacted with differently
  • Bass went too far in the "everything is an X" direction
• don't circlejerk language shit
  • Kernel is great but this probably doesn't need operatives
• types, with inference (hindley milner?)
  • no optional typing. don't want fragmentation. it shouldn't be that complicated anyway.
• vertically integrated (good marketing speak for "tightly coupled")
• need to be able to work on this as a 20% project
  • example: want tree-sitter, but don't want to maintain two grammars.
  • solution: codegen AST from tree-sitter, use it for actual parsing too.