Show HN: _hyperscript – an async-transparent scripting langauge for the web

4 points

5 years ago

Hi Folks,

We have been working on an experimental front end programming langauge, hypescript, as a companion project for htmx.

  https://hyperscript.org/

Its syntax is based loosely on HyperTalk, the scripting language for HyperCard.

It has some feature that the HN crowd might find interesting:

Async-transparency - as much as possible, the runtime tries to hide the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous code

  https://hyperscript.org/docs/#promises

  https://hyperscript.org/docs/#async

Event driven - events are treated as first class citizens, including event-based control flow

  https://hyperscript.org/docs/#event-control-flow

CSS Literals - you can refer to elements in the DOM directly with syntax like #foo, .bar and <button/>

  on click add .highlight to <button:not([disabled])/>

Extendable language - the parser is pretty open and flexible, allowing you to add new "commands" (statements) to the language

  https://hyperscript.org/docs/#extending

Integrated Debugger - the language has a (very alpha) integrated debugger

  https://hyperscript.org/docs/#debugging

Inline Web Workers - the ability to define a web worker directly in your page

  https://hyperscript.org/docs/#workers

There's a fair bit of other stuff too, SSE and Websocket support, a slew of useful commands for working with the DOM, etc.

This is very early, 0.0.6, so please be gentle, but it is being used in a few places in production. I used it to make the / key jump to the search box on htmx.org, for example.

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