All tests pass: a short story

Summary

All tests pass: a short storyOne night, I wrote a simple tool to pick a random programming language. After shuffling a few times, I landed on Arturo. I decided to try it for fun.What’s Arturo?Best I understand, Arturo is a stack-based programming language. It’s primarily maintained by Yanis Zafirópulos. They published a vision of the language in 2020. Here’s the stated goal from that post:to make something that I myself will use as an easier do-it-all scripting language, you know… automation scripts, templating, latex generation and perhaps help me a bit in the packaging of webview-based applications (think of Electron, but something far more manageable and without having to deal with Node.js and the likes).As a stickler for syntax, I bristle at this writing. That first word, “to”, should be capitalized. In fact, the whole sentence is too long and structured strangely. “latex” should be “LaTeX”.This post, while readable, could be edited for clarity and correctness.Arturo’s website, on the other hand? Flawless! Not a grammar error in sight, and a spiffy design to boot! “Simple. Expressive. Portable.” sits in a prominent <h2>.I scrolled down to see the language’s features. Here are two of the six I liked most, reformatted slightly:Elegant & Minimal: Clean, expressive syntax that gets out of your way. No semicolons, no braces, no noise. Just clear code that says exactly what it means. Learn the basics in minutes, master the rest naturally.[&mldr;]Batteries Included: Web servers, UI toolkit, databases, cryptography, HTTP clients, templating—it’s all built in. Need more? Extend with our package ecosystem. Everything ready from day one.This website is clean&mldr;yet I’m struck by how much I prefer the messy version.I tried writing some Arturo, and didn’t understand what it was trying to be; why would I choose Arturo over something else? Why not just use Python?Then I found that old, unpolished post. Its vision came through unmistakably. I suddenly understood where Arturo ...