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> 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.
> “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
Author of a framework that also stores it's code in IPFS for easy sharing (https://github.com/yazz/yazz). ScrapScript is a really nice concept with how it stores code. I originally got the idea for storing the code as a hash of the contents from Unison, and it looks like the idea is really starting to catch on with more and more languages now. Well done!