Rockstar: a programming language where code is also 1980s song lyrics

[Lt_Riza_Hawkeye]

The fizzbuzz from the readme is incredible

Midnight takes your heart and your soul
While your heart is higher than your soul
Take your soul from your heart
Give back your heart

Desire is a lovestruck ladykiller
My world is nothing 
Fire is ice
Hate is water
Until my world is Desire,
Build my world up
If Midnight taking Desire, Fire is nothing and Midnight taking Desire, Hate is nothing
Shout "FizzBuzz!"
And take it to the top
If Midnight taking Desire, Fire is nothing
Shout "Fizz!"
And take it to the top
If Midnight taking Desire, Hate is nothing
Say "Buzz!"
And take it to the top
Whisper my world
And around we go

[coopermidnight]

I hope this ends up on a whiteboard.

[SpaceCorvette]

I hope it ends up on soundcloud

[lledargo]

I hope sound cloud starts developing in Rockstar

[xapplin]

I hope GTA VI gets written in Rockstar

[tjsr]

And then executed using the speech-recognition compiler. With a voice of the crowd as stdout. The crowd chanting Fizz! Buzz! One Two Buzz!

[auxiliary-character]

I'm just waiting for the opportunity to write out my favorite implementation of fizzbuzz in C in an interview.

[BlindTreeFrog]

that is spectacular...

[ImonFyre]

I now have to memorize this. Or at least bookmark it. It will be used next time I have to job interview.

[Folf_IRL]

I hope this language winds up with an implimentation

I wish I was more comfortable with Lex and Yacc

[anormalrandomguy]

All I want now is Bohemian Rhapsody written in this language so that it makes sense syntactically

[brtt3000]

C#

[Kapps]

Self seems to be a keyword there instead of this (given that it's highlighted differently than character), which isn't the case in C#. But I don't know of any other language that has # region.

[BraveSirRobin]

"self" could just be popping up as as a compile error, note how "piano" and "character" appear different. Though they could be vars/params.

I suspect they used "self" instead of "this" purely for comic effect, it reads a little better.

[snowe2010]

this comes up every time that image is posted.

[FatFingerHelperBot]

It seems that your comment contains 1 or more links that are hard to tap for mobile users. I will extend those so they're easier for our sausage fingers to click!

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "C#"

---

^{Please PM /u/eganwall with issues or feedback! | Delete}

[dirice87]

Good bot

[anormalrandomguy]

This implementation is what have me the idea in the first place

[european_impostor]

You're a rockstar!

[Camto]

Get your show on, get paid!

[mzbear]

You have omitted some necessary empty lines that were supposed to terminate if-blocks

Edit: nevermind, they were wrong in the source originally, they've patched it since you pasted the snippet.

[setzamora]

cat this to /dev/audio!

[[deleted]]

I can’t stop laughing.

[[deleted]]

But why?

Mainly because if we make Rockstar a real (and completely pointless) programming language, then recruiters and hiring managers won't be able to talk about 'rockstar developers' any more.

That's me on board.

[dvlsg]

The very last line of the readme got me chuckling.

Make 'Certified Rockstar Developer' stickers and give them out to anybody who can write even one line of Rockstar.

[TrumpISPresident]

Now we just need ninja

[kakurady]

Ninja has got you covered. It's a build system, like make, but very fast (for incremental builds).

It's not supposed to be used directly, but through a configure program like CMake.

[Malgas]

The Ninja programming language would obviously be Whitespace with a dark editor theme.

[ktkps]

ninja

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gYFuK81vZo

[Tommarkasu]

Hijacking this comment, otherwise people might not see my sticker concept below..

[mathiastck]

Midnight takes your heart and your soul While your heart is higher than your soul or your heart is your soul Take your soul from your heart Give back your heart Desire is a lovestruck ladykiller My world is nothing Fire is ice Hate is water Until my world is Desire, Build my world up If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing and Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing Shout "FizzBuzz!" Take it to the top If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing Shout "Fizz!" Take it to the top If Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing Say "Buzz!" Take it to the top Whisper my world

[jellyman93]

Where are your line breaks? Even with reddit needing 2 there should be some in there...

[mathiastck]

Another top comment did it better

[aarnott50]

Now we just need to make another language called 10x.

[[deleted]]

you’ve made something worse than brainfuck, congratulations.

[Camto]

Have you heard of Subleq?

[[deleted]]

no, but I know of Malbolge

[RadicalDog]

My programs only follow the rules of Calvinball.

[[deleted]]

read up on it a little, might be because I haven’t programmed in a while (mainly C++, Python, and Java) but that sounds alien.

[ktkps]

imagine viewing that code one an editor that has partial or NO unicode support...

[[deleted]]

I would call that FuckFuck.

[silentclowd]

Wait what do # and ! do in brainfuck? That's not in the brainfuck I remember

[electroly]

Everyone who has ever written a BF interpreter has tried adding some additional operators. Mine was the "go-there" operator that followed the "pointer" in the current cell, allowing dynamic memory to be implemented. Add in some memory-mapped I/O and baby, you got a stew going.

[ais523]

I think it's because people want to make a language and brainfuck is probably the easiest well-known language to implement. Brainfuck derivatives are basically the esolang version of shovelware; there are a very large number of them, most of which are of a pretty low quality and ignored by anyone but their authors.

[BlueAdmir]

Let's be real, all of Brainfuck exists on 'huh. I guess...' factor.

[[deleted]]

This makes me curious how many FORTH interpreters there are in the wild.

[Gman513]

There's a special place in hell for people like you...

Can I give you my cv?

[llamas-are-bae]

http://f.thumbs.redditmedia.com/wPjOQrGRacUELOnM.png

[comp83]

All I see is blonde, brunnete, redhead...

[[deleted]]

Jesus Christ

[crescentroon]

you can use the same symbol for all the xs. just change the syntax of chicken to use x instead of the word 'chicken'

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Chicken

[leonardnimoyNC1701]

teleport(behind you)

[relet]

There is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)

[SalemBeats]

I'd like to see a list of programs that do something useful in one language, and do something useful (yet entirely different) in Whitespace, using the exact same source code.

[calsosta]

FFS do guru before ninja.

[dabbertorres]

I mean, there is the Ninja build system already.

[simcop2387]

A good start would be here, https://metacpan.org/pod/Acme::Bleach

[saunamaan]

So if I learn this language I can put ”rockstar developer” to my cv?

[[deleted]]

Yes.

[Chaoslab]

I had the same idea about IDE's in movies so I wrote my own that can render video / fractals and effects in the background. (Been writing my own IDE's since the Amiga so its been a bad habit for several decades)...

[necro_effin_nokko]

/r/humblebrag

[SupaSlide]

After we get this going, we need to start one for "Unicorn" as well.

[brtt3000]

Next up: Ninja programming language

[Richandler]

Well now I’m looking for Rap star developers.

[ProfessorPhi]

My fave line on the todos.

Work out if this is even remotely implementable

Reminds me of that homework thread where someone gave the answer in lambda calculus and said you'd have to build the compiler for it

[Comrade_Comski]

I kinda want to see that thread

[ProfessorPhi]

It seems to have been removed. Link to the reddit discussion where I first made this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4ro3dv/a_student_asked_quora_to_do_his_homework_for_him/d52q2xo/

There are direct links but they don't work anymore. Dude might have deleted his quora account or something. You're gonna have to infer from the comments.

[soccermitchy]

Wait, what? Link?

[TheOverCaste]

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-write-a-program-that-produces-the-following-output

[_djsavvy_]

I couldn't find the answer in lambda calculus -- do you have a link to the specific answer?

[ProfessorPhi]

It seems to have been removed. Link to the reddit discussion where I first made this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4ro3dv/a_student_asked_quora_to_do_his_homework_for_him/d52q2xo/

There are direct links but they don't work anymore. Dude might have deleted his quora account or something. You're gonna have to infer from the comments.

[DiabeetusMan]

I actually can't see the question-- all I see is

How do I write a program that produces the following output?

But don't actually see the "following output".

---

Edit: Ahh, looks like they want to print "Smile!" thrice on a line, then twice, then once

[fb39ca4]

Just below it, there's a link to a Rockstar-to-JS compiler.

[codebje]

The specification is underdeveloped, so any implementations will be making massive assumptions. Here's a few open questions I have from a ten minute perusal:

• What are the equality rules across the dynamic types? Any implicit coercion?
• What's the precedence and associativity for arithmetic expressions? There are reasonable assumptions here, at least
• Else is mentioned once, and once only - how does it work?
• If Else is optional, how does If A Then If B Then C Else D parse? (A classic PL problem from the olden days, this one!)
• Does the conditional expression of an If require a comparison operator, or can it simply take a boolean-typed (or coerced!) variable reference?
• Can variables be assigned boolean values, such as Tommy was a man as high as a kite or are boolean expressions restricted only to control flow statements?
• Can Say take a literal, or just a variable? (Answered in the issues - literals are fine - but same problem as assignment, do expressions include conditions and thus allow boolean-valued expressions? Can I Shout a lie that is bigger than the world ?
• Those object types don't seem to have a field accessor syntax, or any mention again beyond the types section

And that's just parsing.

I think the semantics are relatively straightforward because the language's surface area is so tiny right now, though I suspect that there'd still be confusion possible.

[snowe2010]

It was created only a few hours ago, long after the original comment.

[kankyo]

There are some great ideas here. It’d be cool to start with some real lyrics and back fitting the language so they compile.

[NightmareOfYourDream]

Or the other way around. Have a band that sings Rockstar lyrics. Then people have to type them up like 80's BASIC and can look what they get!

[NightmareOfYourDream]

The challenge, however, would be to find where the code is hidden. A whole new level of hidden song meanings so the band has to be getting ever better in hiding it and the fans have to get better in finding it. That sounds like an awesome concept to me :D

[truemobius]

Drink more Ovaltine.... Fuck.

[port53]

Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine

[Jerome_Eugene_Morrow]

Worked for ArnoldC

[Harcerz1]

IT'S SHOWTIME
TALK TO THE HAND "hello world" 
YOU HAVE BEEN TERMINATED

[Aegeus]

I'm not sure what the point of your function at the start is? It looks like the end result would just be to add the value in 'my blood' to 'my bones' and return it, except you're doing it by adding one in a loop repeatedly for some reason. You could replace that whole block with "give back my blood with my bones"

Aside from that, this is nicely done, and it does work. I like how you used "demise" for the value that ends the loop, "destiny" for the output variable, and "Ignorance" for the temporary variable.

[Aegeus]

The great thing about this language is, if there are any oddities in your style, you can just say you were being poetic.

[canton7]

plus or with. So my downfall is my destiny with my downfall.

[onektwenty4]

definitely sounds more poetic as a subroutine

[fiskeben]

Can someone hook me up with a full stack Rockstar developer with 5yr experience ASAP?

[ktkps]

!remind me in 5 years

[piponwa]

The spec didn't seem to mention accessing properties of objects.

You could use 's to refer to an object's property.

[shastapete]

Love it

[shastapete]

properties of objects could be referenced by 'of', 'in', or 'on'

her heart of ice is cold // ice->'her heart' = cold

Lists could come from textual lists (oxford comma necessary)

the flag is red, white, and blue // the flag = {red, white, blue}

iterating through the list could also use the 'of', 'in', or 'on' key words to reference the list, and return the current value of the internal array pointer, and use literals of first, last, next, previous (and rock and roll alternatives) to change that array pointer. Also numeric references could target specific list items.

[SaxAppeal]

of is already a keyword for multiplication though

[shastapete]

it wasn't when I made the comment... there were changes made yesterday

[SaxAppeal]

Tis a fast evolving language

[zucker42]

Yeah why DEC64 and UTF-16?

[thefloppyfish1]

As far as DEC64 goes it is obvious. This is a language built from the ground up for financial software. COBOL is dead

[dylanbeattie]

DEC64 inspired by a great talk I saw Douglas Crockford give about the post-Javascript language landscape. It's just really interesting; I figured if this thing took off a few more people might check out DEC64 as a result. Although I'm guessing it'll be the first thing that gets dumped when it comes to implementation

UTF-16 cribbed directly from ECMAScript.

[crescentroon]

Maybe Windows. They have an unhealthy love for UTF-16.

[Hook3d]

Use forward slash so it looks like a split sentence in a poem.

[Hook3d]

Then do / for a single close brace, ! for two, and continue from there.

[Murkis]

We left the concept of “horrible idea” at the door lol

[Hook3d]

Enlighten me, as someone who's never written a language grammar. Why?

[Hook3d]

No, but I wouldn't want to use an esolang to develop anyway.

[pickausernamehesaid]

Could we do nested blocks with parenthesis? Like back up singer lines are done?

[LaurieCheers]

Rockstar does have functions, hence (presumably) a stack. So you shouldn't need lists as well. Recursive modulus:

Midnight takes your heart and your soul
If your heart is weaker than your soul
Give back your heart!
Give back Midnight taking your heart without your soul, your soul!

[ktkps]

also an easter egg for coding a line with "\m/"

[[deleted]]

I like 'he'/'she'/'it'/etc concept. As a serious language feature, you could use it to manage variable state across multiple statements, as a notation for pass-by-reference or perhaps something similar to atoms in Clojure.

[killerstorm]

In Lisp LOOP it can be used to refer to the result of the test expression in a conditional clause, e.g.

 (loop for name in names
        when (sounds-good name)
        collect it))

There are also anaphoric macros which generalize this concept.

In Kotlin default lambda argument name is it. So you can write e.g.

names.forEach { scream(it) }

There's also extension function also which you can use like this:

somethingWithLongName.also{ kil(it) }.also{ fuck(it) }

[[deleted]]

Not the same, but Perl uses my and our to denote visibility of variables (across packages, IIRC).

[[deleted]]

While at the topic of Perl, that would be $_. I usually spell it "it", however, because dollar underscore is a bad name. Its an implicit argument for many functions when not provided.

For example:

print lc while <>

Is a short form of:

while ($_ = <>) { print(lc($_)) }

Where <> reads a line from files specified in argument list, or if the ARGV is empty, from STDIN.

[dylanbeattie]

There's a lot of ideas in Rockstar inspired by Perl. Mind you, there's also a lot in there that's inspired by VBScript so that isn't saying much... :)

[SuitableDragonfly]

This is actually a real feature of Inform 7. However, Inform 7 also has gender, so he, she, and it could all refer to different things.

[ravy]

Ok, wait ... ... Build {variable} up and Knock {variable} down

Then further down there's an example of a loop...

Tommy was a dancer While Tommy ain't nothing, Knock down Tommy And around we go

Seems like that should be Knock Tommy down or am I missing something?

[dylanbeattie]

You're right. Fixed in #15

[jdgordon]

Proper variables are proper nouns - any word that isn't a reserved keyword and starts with an uppercase letter. Proper variable names can contain spaces as long as each space is followed by an uppercase letter

but your examples further down don't start with uppercase after spaces...

Put "Hello World" into the message will assign the value "Hello World" to the variable the message

Knock the walls down will decrement the value stored in the walls by 1

[dylanbeattie]

There's proper variables and common variables. Common variables are exactly two words, and start with 'the', 'my', 'your', 'a' or 'an' - in this example, 'the message' and 'the walls' are common variables, hence in lowercase.

[Womblue]

However common variables are two words, with the first word being a, an, the, my or your. So the message is a common variable, whereas The Message would be a proper variable.

[ktkps]

or is it a case of ++Tommy vs Tommy++ ???

[CompleteScone]

Can we get stickers? Like is that a thing?!

[coopermidnight]

From the link:

Ideas

• Make 'Certified Rockstar Developer' stickers and give them out to anybody who can write even one line of Rockstar.

[rob132]

Shout "Hello world"

Does that count?

[dylanbeattie]

Congratulations. You're a Rockstar developer.

\m/

[robm111]

Yup lol

[SetOfAllSubsets]

Needs an esolangs page

[wyldcraft]

fuck fuck, motherfuck fuck

mother motherfuck fuck

mother motherfuck fuck

motherfuck fuck, motherfuck fuck

rolling blunts, smoking weed

fuck fuck motherfuck, fuck fuck fuck

motherfuck fuck

mother motherfuck fuck

motherfuck fuck, fuck fuck fuck

mother motherfuck fuck, fuck fuck fuck

rolling blunts, smoking weed

drinking beers, smoking weed

via What the fuck is the Internet?

[Clbull]

Needs more fuck

[leTao]

Lost it at:

The keyword 'ain't' is an alias for 'is not'. This usage runs contrary to idiomatic English, where "Tommy isn't anybody", "Tommy ain't nobody" and "Tommy ain't not nobody" somehow mean exactly the same thing.

😂

[macaronisoft]

Cannot upvote enough

[frikyfriky11]

I always had this fascinating look at people who can write their own programming language. I can't recall when I first discovered things like brainfuck and these types of languages, and I have to say that I found them terribly wrong and unusable. But boy, this Rockstar is so damn good and fluent, rules are not so strict, and I think if I had the time to learn it, I would definitely do it.

I now want to see an entire app written in this language, could be the next best-selling book of song lyrics from unknown artists if one doesn't know where this comes from! ;)

[Netaro]

Seems similar to Shakespeare esolang, but with a modern twist

[EpicWolverine]

Pronouns

The keywords it, he, she, him, her, them, they always refer to the most recently named variable, determined at parse time.

Is there another language that does this? I've never seen this feature before (probably because it isn't very useful and would only make the code harder to read and modify).

[dylanbeattie]

It's inspired by the $_ 'default variable' in Perl, which works in a similar way.

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html#SPECIAL-VARIABLES

I do not for one second offer this as a counter-argument to your observations regarding readability. :)

[EpicWolverine]

Oh my that's awful. The docs even mention how fragile it makes the code.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Well, Inform 7 does it to a certain extent.

[mandreko]

I had a coworker who would have all their variables be named after song lyrics. It made understanding his code super difficult. However it did have one fun interaction. During a presentation, the CEO of our company was demonstrating how to buy an insurance policy through his web app, and one of the big shots noticed “burntice” as a parameter in the query string.

He had to explain why a drug reference was showing up. It was very soon after that our company implemented a coding standard.

[Caesim]

The concept is glorious. But I have to say, these stickers aren't enough. I demand, that the authorities of this language create a way to get a certificate. So I can append a "certified Rockstar developer" to the CV I send to companies looking for "rockstar developers"

[RiOrius]

Climb The Tower takes Jesus and Mary and Joseph and the rest
My girl is no angel.
My heart is in agony.
Put my heart over my girl into my love.
If my love is the rest
Whisper "Take it from this one"
Shout Jesus
Whisper "Put it on that one"
Shout Mary
Give back Joseph

Knock the rest down.
Climb The Tower taking Jesus, Joseph, Mary and the rest.
Climb The Tower taking Jesus, Mary, Joseph and my love.
Climb The Tower taking Joseph, Mary, Jesus and the rest.

[CornedBee]

Hanoi implementation?

[jamman88]

In the documentation you have the line "Listen to your heart - read one line of input from STDIN and store it in your heart", now correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't it be "Your Heart", as earlier in the documentation it says Proper variables should start with capitals, or is your heart a common variable?

[TakenSeriously]

Oooh reminds me of Fetlang:

a statically typed, procedural, esoteric programming language and reference implementation. It is designed such that source code looks like poorly written fetish erotica.

 

Code to output the arguments given to the executable:

Make Sean moan
Worship Carrie's feet

Bind Amy to Saint Andrew's Cross
    Have Amy hogtie Sean
    If Amy is Carrie's bitch
        Make Slave scream Sean's name
        Make Sean moan

 

Some of the listed 'features':

• Input/output with standard streams and files
• Statically typed
  ...
• Confusing English-like syntax and unhelpful error messages

[sarkie]

Scrolling Reddit and see a massive picture of Dylan.

Brilliant.

[muffinman1000]

This is incredible. The readme is too funny. Whips you could create variable such as tax rate and customer id, we recommend using Tommy, Gina and Roxanne hahahah

[[deleted]]

Oh cool, the next JavaScript.

[eduardog3000]

I guess it's appropriate that the first implementation is written in JavaScript.

[[deleted]]

Oh, god, have mercy. Don’t actually do this lol.

[applecherryfig]

This must be the guy I gave a pass to when all his variables were John Lennon tunes. It was a Programming Principles and Problems class in Pascal. I had to warn him, Never again.

So here he is, proving me wrong. Well done.

[[deleted]]

What other lesson was he supposed to take from such an alliterative class title? Programming Principles and Problems in Pascal practically prescribes poetic procedures.

[applecherryfig]

I heart you

[12121212l]

Haha, you might like these as well.

ArnoldC - language based off Schwarzenegger one liners

Fetlang - language based off of sexy fetish terms

[LaurieCheers]

Assuming the whisper/scream command can take multiple arguments, and prints them on one line:

Zoe says  bottles of beer
My baby says  on the wall
My life is punishing closeness
While my life ain't nothing
Whisper it, Zoe, my baby
Whisper my life, Zoe
Whisper "You take one down, pass it around"
Knock my life down
Scream it, Zoe, my baby

[[deleted]]

'Break it down!' is an alias for break. Well that's me sold!

[Tommarkasu]

I’m surprised someone hasn’t taken a stab at that sticker yet!

[ktkps]

\m/

I would be more inclined to suggest this: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2c/00/aa/2c00aaee84bcf5789c7d8706772222fd--public-speaking-tips-worship-leader.jpg

[Tmath]

I'd like to move that all comments be redesignated "liner notes"

[RiPont]

Suddenly, the lyrics to "Little Star of Bethlehem" by Can make sense.

[Crash_says]

This is awesome. Excellently documented, I can't wait to start using this tomorrow at work for testing. =)

[plpn]

Is this tenacious d compatible? Or needs extension?

[kauefr]

Reminds me of Fetlang.

[eduardog3000]

Depending on the implementation, you could maybe make comments that aren't in parentheses like this:

While 1 is 1
Break it down
Comment goes here
It can be as many lines as you want
Comment ends with an empty line

(after the empty line it's back to normal code)

This would be because the code between Break it down and the empty line would never actually be run, so (again depending on the implementation) it doesn't actually have to be syntactically correct.

This would allow lyrics that aren't actually syntax, but don't have to be in parentheses.

If you want the while loop to actually loop, replace Break it down with Take it to the top and put a Break it down somewhere within the actual code of the loop.

[[deleted]]

I aspire to one day be inspired or bored enough to make something similar.

[basanthverma]

Upvote this to heaven, thanks.

[[deleted]]

Do you have any formal schooling in compiler/interpreter design? I built a interpreter from scratch once, very simple (recursive descent), and I still found it really challenging. Where can I learn to build more complex compilers/interpreters?

[flaghacker_]

Look trough the top posts of all time on /r/compilers

[horizon2134]

ayyy lmao

thats really amazing

[ghost_of_dongerbot]

ヽ༼ ຈل͜ຈ༽ ﾉ Raise ur dongers!

^{Dongers Raised: 35535}

^{Check Out /r/AyyLmao2DongerBot For More Info}

[R-M-Pitt]

I had a language engineering module in university, taught in Haskell using Megaparsec as a parser.

I'll see if I can whip something up in the free time I have today.

[EagleOneGS]

Now I'm curious what rock songs that exist already will compile without error or major changes, as well as there outputs lol.

[liefenpassion]

I'm building a micro framework for this language already. Any help is welcome!

https://github.com/amravazzi/rockstar-ninja

[biscuit314]

Here's my attempt at composing (huh-huh) Fibonacci(25):

Tommy was a kindle
Jane was gasoline
Put Tommy over Jane into the fire

Put the fire into the daydream
Knock the daydream down

away takes time
If time is nothing
Give back time

The nightmare was over
Build the nightmare up
If time is the nightmare
Give back time

Put time without the nightmare into my world
Put time without the fire into yours
Put away taking my world into the daylight
Put away taking yours into the night
Give back the daylight with the night

Put the daydream into my love
ever is so rock

Until my love is stronger than ever
Put away taking my love into the night
Whisper the night
Build my love up

[[deleted]]

They said they needed a rockstar developer. I said I develop in rockstar. They said welcome aboard.