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Tabloid: The Clickbait Headline Programming Language (tabloid.vercel.app)
317 points by sadeshmukh 1 day ago | hide | past | favorite | 45 comments




Missed opportunity to title the post/submission “Will this programming language revolutionize software development?” :)

I hope error messages say

  YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU'LL SEE IN LINE ${line_number}

Errors should be thrown as TRULY EXCEPTIONAL

PROGRAMMER DESTROYED BY FACTS AND SYNTAX

Exception claps back at programmer.

[GONE {errortype}!]

I actually felt pretty impressed they kept to the non-clickbait standard of the community and still crushed the post :)

Popular in:

2020 (245 points, 38 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24578749

2024 (217 points, 29 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40964261


I didn't think some keywords could make me have fun but they did :D

Maybe I should use macros like this for productive work to make sure programming stays engaging and entertaining!

  EXPERTS CLAIM SECRET_CODE TO BE 129

  DISCOVER HOW TO MESS WITH NUMBER
  RUMOR HAS IT
    EXPERTS CLAIM RESULT TO BE NUMBER MODULO 2
    WHAT IF RESULT IS ACTUALLY 0
      SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT NUMBER DIVIDED BY 2
    LIES!
      SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT (NUMBER TIMES 3) PLUS 1
  END OF STORY
  
  EXPERTS CLAIM ITERATION TO BE 0
  DISCOVER HOW TO DEEP_RESEARCH WITH NUMBER
  RUMOR HAS IT
    EXPERTS CLAIM ITERATION TO BE ITERATION PLUS 1
    EXPERTS CLAIM RESULT TO BE MESS OF NUMBER
    WHAT IF RESULT IS ACTUALLY 1 RUMOR HAS IT
      SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT ITERATION
    END OF STORY
    LIES!
      SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT DEEP_RESEARCH OF RESULT
  END OF STORY 

  EXPERTS CLAIM RESULT TO BE DEEP_RESEARCH OF SECRET_CODE

  YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS (((("shocking fact about innocious number discovered: " PLUS SECRET_CODE) PLUS " takes a whopping ") PLUS RESULT) PLUS " steps to reach 1")

  PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE

Minor patch before calling DEEP_RESEARCH to make it interactive:

   EXPERTS CLAIM SECRET_CODE TO BE LATEST NEWS ON 'Innocious number?'

Good one! It would be disingenuous to name it DEEP_RESEARCH without incorporating LATEST NEWS. And what could be a better source of news than the user?

How about CONSIDERED HARMFUL as a postfix negation operator?

Perhaps UK centric but I’d also consider:

IN BOOST TO x — increment x by 1

IN BLOW TO x — decrement by 1

Throw in ‘BAN THIS SICK FILTH’ as a way to throw an exception.

Of course, the absence of SLAMS and SNUBBED are notable. They should fit in somewhere.



Missed opportunity for loops to be

BREAKING NEWS … KEEP READING TO DISCOVER


BREAKING NEWS! This is the perfect amount of stupid. I'm going to see if I can't convince my team to convert our codebase over ASAP. FOLLOW ME to find out how it goes.

you forgot to

PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE

now the program doesnt terminate


Now we just need the companion turing complete languages:

Thunderfoot - write screenplays for youtube videos debunking articles written in Tabloid

Fisker - Writes troll posts to discord/irc/steam community to highlight how awesome TOPIC in AWESOME ARTICLE written in Tabloid is

Shitlist - Generates awesomelists repos on github for TOPIC


.BOT - Controls botfarms with built-in shill primitives on the X virtual machine, successor to BitMusk

This is refreshingly ridiculous.

The title of the post should have been "SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT".

I'm more of a KTHXBYE kinda guy.

I think it could be improved by ADDING A FEATURE with multiple texts for the same mechanic.

Less repetitive == MORE AWESOME

And of course, harder to learn/understand.


Missed opportunity:

The joke should be that regardless of the program you write, nothing happens. No real signal, just like most real clickbait content.


So brainrot and brainfuck had a baby?

If you make sure it follows the style of COBOL. we can document it in the history books!

I look forward to the implementation of the TACO instruction.

I used this language in a workshop on parser construction at MCH2022. The particepants where asked to construct the grammar for the language, which proved harder than I had expected for most of them.

This would benefit from combining the literal rules from TrumpScript [0]:

> All numbers must be strictly greater than 1 million. The small stuff is inconsequential to us.

[0]: https://github.com/samshadwell/TrumpScript


Write amazing programs with this one weird trick

Love the energy and keyword selections. But also probably a great exercise to have gone through that I've always considered doing

This is the heart and soul of hacker news

I thought that was maison d'errorier

And That's a Good Thing

Love `TOTALLY RIGHT` and `COMPLETELY WRONG` as boolean, but `TRUTH` and `FAKE NEWS` sounds better. Too much social media consumption makes me feel that "truth" or "fact" are kinda sarcastic.

It also reminds me TrumpScript: https://github.com/samshadwell/TrumpScript


But... Which one of TRUTH and FAKE NEWS is the equivalent of boolean TRUE and FALSE respectively????

The original options are more clear imo, even though they show their age.


You're right, I'm not sure neither... Probably it should be FACT and ALTERNATIVE FACT and no one knows what means what.

It’s been too long since something like this has happened. Kudos.

This gave me a laugh! Some variation of "the Top Five Most Popular Quirks and Features" from the description could be a good way to define arrays on size n (e.g. perhaps numerical instead of Five).

"n WEIRD INTEGERS YOU WON'T BELIEVE ARE REAL!"

this is hilarious, thanks for the laughs!

The natural complement to LOLCODE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE


Not written in Rust? Instant pass!

Dereferencing pointers: „click here to find out more“

I love it.



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