Scroll Alternatives

scroll reviews and mentions

• [OC] Cancer in the United States: Heatmap Visualizations
  3 projects | /r/dataisbeautiful | 15 Mar 2023
• Ask HN: What are you building that is taking multiple years to make usable?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2023

  It took me many years to get Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) to the point where I love it and am confident it will be the dominant language for writing going forward (replacing markdown).

  I first had to invent Tree Notation (2017), which I got wrong on my first two tries (2012's Note and 2013's Space). Then I needed to invent Grammar (2017), and then I made the predecessor to Scroll called Dumbdown (2019). 2 years after that I shipped the first version of Scroll (2021).

  Now we are on Scroll version 58 and it's blazing fast, very simple, extremely extendible, and scales very well.

  It was 90% me for a while, but recently been very much a team effort.

  It took a while to get right because it's a whole new kind of language, so there were a lot of mistakes that I made and had to undo, and it took a while to figure out exactly what was special about it and how to double down on that.

• Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jan 2023
• Anyone interested in starting a local newspaper using new tech?
  2 projects | /r/Entrepreneur | 18 Jan 2023

  I recently started 2 new newspapers: https://longbeach.pub/ and http://hawaii.pub/. Very different from traditional newspapers in that they are: public domain, open source (view source on every page), and built using a new language (https://scroll.pub/).

• Argdown: A simple syntax for complex argumentation
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jan 2023

  Another cool site I found recently (via the replit guy) is https://www.rootclaim.com/

  Very cool way to present arguments.

  I'm thinking of taking that, as well as argdown, and building some easy to use keywords in scroll https://scroll.pub/

• We Need to Know LR and Recursive Descent Parsing Techniques
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2023

  > Context-free grammars, and their associated parsing techniques, don't align well with real-world compilers, and thus we should deemphasise CFGs (Context-Free Grammars) and their associated parsing algorithms.

  I think CFG are highly overrated. Top down recursive descent parsers are simple and allow you to craft more human languages. I think building top down parsers is something every dev should do. It's a simple technique with tremendous power.

  I think the source code for Scroll (https://github.com/breck7/scroll/tree/main/grammar) demonstrates how liberating moving away from CFGs can be. Easy to extend, compose, build new backends, debug, et cetera. Parser, compiler, and interpreter for each node all in one place. Swap nodes around between languages. Great evolutionary characteristics.

  I'll stop there (realizing I need to improve the docs and write a blog post).

• I am building a new kind of newspaper and so have been collecting and studying old newspapers. Here is one from my collection, an issue of the Columbian Centinel (Boston), from 1795, when George Washington was president. The classifieds make me laugh. Lots of Schooners for sale.
  3 projects | /r/Journalism | 16 Jan 2023

  - Uses a new language called Scroll: https://scroll.pub/

• Start a Fucking Blog
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2023

  Also, put down Markdown and give our Scroll a try: https://scroll.pub

  It now powers sites like my own blog (https://breckyunits.com/), knowledge bases like PLDB.com, and our first new public domain daily newspaper called the Long Beach Pub (https://longbeach.pub/1-3-2023.html).

• Programming languages in 25 days, Part 2: Reflections on language design
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2023

  > Java, Go, Javascript, Rust, etc are all regularly written with whitespace, and have tools to enforce such formatting, but they don't derive information from it.

  Ah you reminded me. A curious phenomenon I've observed with Prettier in JS and fmt in Go is languages are moving to standardized whitespace, but as you said, not yet deriving information from it. I don't know enough about Java or Rust but I suspect they probably both have adopted a Prettier/fmt like convention where all code is formatted on save. So it seems like we are moving to a world where it will be a simple flip of a switch to then start having popular languages extract meaning from the whitespace.

  > Also, Python has existed for decades and still there is little further adoption of indentation-sensitivity. It doesn't seem like a wave of indentation-sensitive languages will be coming any time soon.

  I think it's coming big time this year. I think our Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) will catch fire and be the go to language instead of Markdown by the end of the year. Then with the increasing success of TreeBase (powering PLDB and others) we will start to see JSON fall for config formats and document storage databases. A lot more will happen to, data vis will be a big one, but those 2 I'm reasonably certain of happening in 2023.

• Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
  69 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2022

  GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/. I don't miss Google Analytics at all.

  Loom. It's not open source I don't think but I'm digging it and excited when a public domain competitor comes out.

  Our https://scroll.pub/. It's far beyond markdown at this point. I am able to not only write better but also maintain thousands of pages of content by hand (well, most of the credit for that belongs to Apple M1s, Sublime Text, git, MacOS, and Github). The stuff we are doing with it now would just not be possible with anything else, and what we're coming out with next year is super exciting. It's all public domain.

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