alt Hacker NewsMini Micro Fantasy Computer
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It's so odd that the only nontrivial example code in the paper is completely buggy. The find longest common prefix function of a list of strings fails (try ["a", "bc", "ade"]).
https://miniscript.org/files/MiniScript-QuickRef.pdf:
“A class or object is a map with a special __isa entry that points to the parent. This is set automatically when you use the new operator.
Shape = {"sides":0}
Square = new Shape
Square.sides = 4
x = new Square
x.sides // 4So
- Shape is a map (it is created using the syntax defined earlier, using a literal string as key)
- Square is a class?
- x is an object?
Or is this language prototype based? If so, why mention the word “class”? If not, isn’t it confusing to use “new someMap” to create a class and “new someClass” to create an object?
I also find it curious to see that division is defined on lists and strings. What would that mean?
Edit: reading https://miniscript.org/files/Strout_iSTEM-Ed2021.pdf, it is prototype based. That’s interesting for a teaching language.
I was a bit confused until I realized that https://miniscript.org/ isn't the same programming language as https://bitcoin.sipa.be/miniscript/.
Also check out this one. It is a real physical computer: https://www.francksauer.com/index.php/micro-8
Looks cool. I most enjoyed the zombies game someone uploaded on itch.io. One thing to note is that game speeds feel very fast to me. I barely did anything in the asteroids game and the others also seem to run quite fast. It could be just me.
I wonder how hard it would be translate this to Dutch. I would like my kids to start experimenting but that’s a bit impractical if they need to learn English first..
Apparently it’s high-level only, i.e. no underlying machine instruction set or addressable memory.
Why not for 3 eur buy some basic arduino or other tiny hardware to tinker with and for another few eur, tiny i2c/oled display, wires and set of basic switches? You start programming with option to expand to the larger project in the future. You have constraints of real device, community is much larger and there are more learning resources.
I think that's really cool. I wonder when this started development?
I wonder why all these easy-to-learn languages use indentation to denote scope, not something like curly braces. Isn't it actually harder to explain?
really like the creativity, cool stuff
This feels nostalgic!
Ah the nostalgia
Only virtual? That is sad!
I don't get why this kind of projects need :
- a manual
- an installer
when you have Web pages can now
- be offline (PWA)
- be responsive and run on pretty much any device
- run pretty much anything thanks to WASM but anyway already have JS/HTML/CSS as bare minimum
- can have the instructions AND the runtime on the same page, on any device, instantly
- can connect with physical hardware, see recent https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/web-serial-support-in-fire... or even with APIs.
I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little <$100 laptop with a 7” display.
Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user.
IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is not a good starting point. I’m very fortunate to have started out on my 8kb BASIC machine.