Totally not asking way too many questions of the creator of golfscript

lyxal

May 12, 2023 04:50

@DarrenSmith while you're here - what was it like at the peak of golfscript's popularity? Did you know what you were doing or were you "making things up as you went along" so to speak?

Darren Smith

How would you recommend starting a chat? Just here on stackexchange?

Unrelated String

yeah

just make a room

lyxal

@DarrenSmith yeah, click the "create new room" button on the rooms page

Darren Smith

Well to be honest I only followed it early on and saw its use at golf.shinh.org, then I left code golf for like 7+ years

Unrelated String

lol nice

lyxal

May 12, 2023 04:51

@DarrenSmith so it was something you left to grow on its own?

Darren Smith

It was exciting for me because it was really cool how something so simple could dominate at code golf and it seemed novel. I definitely made things up as I went along, originally it wasn't intended to be good at code golf per say, but to explore the power of eval

Unrelated String

ooooh

that explains a lot

lyxal

(I like hearing/learning from other people who've had mega-langs fwiw)

Darren Smith

What do you mean by grow though since it stayed pretty much the same?

lyxal

the community and popularity

and usage

Unrelated String

May 12, 2023 04:53

i imagine golfscript didn't need much of a community to get popular back in the day

Darren Smith

Yeah, I definitely didn't even know it was being used lol. I hadn't heard of codegolf.stackexchange.com until a few years ago

Unrelated String

or rather, would grow a community purely around people who happened to already try using it

lyxal

@DarrenSmith but you did know it was one of the big-league languages (so to speak)?

Darren Smith

Yeah, it is kind of humbling because now there are so many languages that are good at code golf, it is difficult to attract people

I found out a few years ago that it was pretty heavily used and referenced on the internet, which is kinda what inspired me to do better

Unrelated String

ah, i was about to ask what inspired you to come back :P

lyxal

May 12, 2023 04:57

@DarrenSmith dang - it inspired many generations of golflangs and you didn't even know lol

Darren Smith

But by better I don't necessarily mean be less bytes, but inconsistencies, novelty, etc.

Unrelated String

yeah i feel like so much makes sense now that i know that golfscript wasn't actually designed from the ground up to be golfy

because the whole block eval model is very elegant in its own way, but not so much clearly compact

Darren Smith

It was designed to not "cheat" but be good at golfing. In my mind it was cheating to use binary characters or even 1 letter fn names, since real languages could have just done that if they cared about bytes

Unrelated String

not to mention the multi-character builtins :P

yeah lmao

lyxal

@DarrenSmith why the stack model?

convenience/something you were familiar with/golfiness or something else?

Darren Smith

May 12, 2023 05:00

it was simple to implement and also very concise since you don't need parenthesis and can do basic things tacitly. I think that was the first time I had implemented a stack lang

I feel kind of bad for not having been more familiar with Forth because a lot of the cool stuff had been done before there I believe (I still haven't really used forth). Also I wish I had known more about APL, vectorization is so cool

lyxal

it is

@DarrenSmith did you ever read/hear about/deal with the criticisms about golfing languages from around 2014-2017?

Darren Smith

Yeah I think I searched for those types of things when working on Nibbles

lyxal

did that impact any design choices?

(and sorry if I seem like i'm asking too many questions - it's not every day I get to talk to someone who made one of the biggest golflangs in the past)

Darren Smith

I thought about trying to create another version of golfscript too that addresses the flaws but keeps the simple spirit, since I don't think any language does that, CJam might be the closest but it adds a lot of things. Ultimately I decided not to do that though, not sure how many people would actually be interested

Well, it is very flattering so I don't mind

lyxal

How'd you choose the name for golfscript? Was it a play on javascript?

Darren Smith

May 12, 2023 05:06

I think so, I can't remember specifics though. I thought about so many things and went back and forth on many things in the design. It is honestly really hard to balance between simplicity and conciseness

that was to earlier question

I think script since it was dynamic, and golf since it was good at that (and no other language had golf in the name already)

lyxal

@DarrenSmith (fwiw - you can reply to messages by clicking on the arrow on the left of the message then clicking reply)

Darren Smith

@lyxal thx

lyxal

nw

@DarrenSmith huh, never thought about that being the reason for script

Darren Smith

also interpreted, I mean I thought it was a standard way to name stuff

lyxal

@DarrenSmith how about golfscript 2? (GS2)

Darren Smith

May 12, 2023 05:09

The existing language GS2?

lyxal

yeah

does it address the flaws in your opinion?

Darren Smith

I'm not super familiar with it aside from referencing its commonly used ops to make sure I have those covered. I don't think it does though. I believe it isn't vectorized, or lazy, or statically typed. All of which I think are good (static type for more reliable type overloading)

lyxal

more reliable?

Darren Smith

I was not a fan of the use of the binary characters and just adding a bunch more ops (something I seem to be in the minority for)

yeah. if you do type overloading, and say you have a list and are iterating through it, if an element in it is a different type, the code could do an essentially random operation instead of something like coercion

lyxal

ah I see

so something similar to checking all the types in a list before doing the operation but without the overhead of doing so

Darren Smith

May 12, 2023 05:13

I know dynamic gives you more freedom and can be fun to do some really hacky stuff, but I think the reality is almost all code golf problems are essentially solved with types that could have been static

yeah I think we we write code, even if it is dynamically typed, we still intend the character at a certain spot to do the same thing even if it happens to get different typed values over time

lyxal

(probably my) final question (for now): how'd you discover/get into code golf? I know at the time golfscript was created there was no StackOverflow nor CGSE (here), and code golfing was probably way more niche. Was is through perl golf or some other means?

Darren Smith

I think I saw some random code golf stuff for calculating pi in C a long time ago (like 2003ish). And calculating pi had a special place in my heart, so I tried to beat it and did so. I put that in my signature for forum posts at tasvideos.org and a friend told me about codegolf.com (now defunct)

lyxal

ngl that's pretty cool

Darren Smith

The only choices were ruby, perl, php, python. I don't think I knew ruby at the time, but I wanted to compete so learned it and got way to into it

Unrelated String

ooh, neat

Darren Smith

May 12, 2023 05:20

I really liked the format of not being able to see other's code and trying to beat em (I was pretty competitive I guess)

lyxal

that happens to be the nature of code golfers :p

Darren Smith

Anyway I would love to ask you some questions too since I'm out of the loop, but pretty late here. Good night

lyxal

o/

I'll be happy to be the interviewee when you're ready :p

Totally not asking way too many questions of the creator of golfscript

The Nineteenth Byte

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