INTERCAL, YAML, And Other Horrible Programming Languages
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PROGRAM REJECTED FOR MENTAL HEALTH REASONS
In 1972, two students learning FORTRAN came up with a fantastic new programming language called INTERCAL. INTERCAL is a bit unusual. For example, single quotes are called sparks, and double quotes are called rabbit ears, less than (<) is an angle, and a dash (-) is a worm. This makes the manual read like a word puzzle combined with an extended in-joke.
One final comment about sparks and rabbit-ears; if the next character in the program is a spot, as often happens because onespot variables are common choices for operands, a spark and the following spot can be combined into a wow (!). - INTERCAL Manual.
The compiler errors are where the authors got genuinely creative. Errors include VARIABLES MAY NOT BE STORED IN WEST HYPERSPACE for accessing an array incorrectly, IT CAME FROM BEYOND SPACE for invalid control flow, PROGRAM REJECTED FOR MENTAL HEALTH REASONS for threading issues, I HAVE NO FILE AND I MUST SCREAM for file not found, and many many more.
Yes, this is a parody language, and reading the manual, you get the sense that no one has yet had as much fun writing technical documentation as Lyon and Woods did writing this.
The language itself looks less fun. Here is Hello World:
NOTE THIS IS INTERCAL
PLEASE ,1 <- #5
DO ,1 SUB #1 <- #54
DO ,1 SUB #2 <- #192
DO ,1 SUB #3 <- #136
PLEASE ,1 SUB #4 <- #208
DO ,1 SUB #5 <- #98
DO COME FROM (1)
DO READ OUT ,1
(2) DO ,1 SUB #1 <- #134
(1) PLEASE ABSTAIN FROM (2)One of the exciting innovations of INTERCAL is the COMEFROM instruction, seen here in a variant of BASIC.
10 COMEFROM 40
20 INPUT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME? "; A$
30 PRINT "HELLO, "; A$
40 REMA COMEFROM anywhere in a program can grab control flow from the line you are reading. And in some implementations, if many COMEFROM’s reference the same line, execution splits off in each direction.
A COMEFROM is the inverse of a GOTO statement with multi-threading thrown in. It breaks the mental model of imperative execution where each line’s evaluation leads to the next line. The idea that you can simulate its execution in your head, line by line, is fundamental to imperative programming and COMEFROM attempts to break that model.
VARIABLES MAY NOT BE STORED IN WEST HYPERSPACE
At Twitter, they have a giant monorepo with lots of services in it. And somebody at Twitter wanted to know which language was most prevalent. Which language does Twitter use the most?
Java came in 3rd, and Scala came in 2nd. But 1st was a surprise. The number one programming language used at Twitter was YAML1.
YAML usually doesn’t feel like a programming language to me. The file I’m currently writing in is in markdown with some YAML at the top to set the title and associated fields.
title: INTERCAL, YAML, And Other Horrible Programming Languages
author: AdamNothing executes the YAML. It only offers some information to the blogging platform. But I don’t think that is the type of YAML that made up the volume of config at Twitter.
I suspect a lot of it was build and deployment scripts in the form of YAML. It was the type of configuration that encoded the control flow of some external system. YAML like that lives in this grey zone between declarative configuration and a full-blown programming language.
I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s look at an example from ShellCheck’s build script.
language: shell
os: linux
services:
- dockerThat seems like straight-forward config.
jobs:
include:
- stage: Build
env: BUILD=linux
workspaces:
create:
name: ws-linux
paths: deploycreate, in the above, is starting to seem a bit more like execution. Let’s continue.
script:
- ls -la ${CASHER_DIR}/ || true
- tar -xvf ${CASHER_DIR}/ws-osx-fetch.tgz --strip-components=5
- ls -la deploy
- ./.github_deploy
Now the YAML has just devolved into specifying how to execute a grab bag of commands. We haven’t seen control-flow yet, but it’s coming.
if: type = push
script:
- source ./.multi_arch_docker
- set -ex; multi_arch_docker::main; set +xThere we go, branching. It’s an if statement in a YAML file!
And this isn’t TravisCI, or CI specific. Here is a simple example from Ansible:
- hosts: all
tasks:
- include: foo.yml
when: something == "foo"
- include: bar.yml
when: something == "bar"Here is GitHub Actions:
steps:
- name: Step 7
if: ${{ github.event_name == 'pull_request' && github.event.action == 'unassigned' }}
run: echo This event is a pull request that had an assignee removed.Here is part of a Grafana Helm Chart:
{{ if (or (not .Values.persistence.enabled) (eq .Values.persistence.type "pvc")) }}
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: {{ template "grafana.fullname" . }}
namespace: {{ template "grafana.namespace" . }}
labels:
{{- include "grafana.labels" . | nindent 4 }}
{{- if .Values.labels }}
{{ toYaml .Values.labels | indent 4 }}
{{- end }}
{{- with .Values.annotations }}
annotations:
{{ toYaml . | indent 4 }}
{{- end }}
I think this is a problem2. Writing control flow in a config file is like hammering in a screw. It’s a useful tool being used for the wrong job.
How did we get to this world of little programming languages embedded into YAML? Is calling something configuration just less scary? And if so, is a c++ program just config you give to gcc?
Did things ever get this complicated in XML times?
It turns out they did:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="text" omit-xml-declaration="yes" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:call-template name="FizzBuzz">
<xsl:with-param name="i" select="1" />
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template name="FizzBuzz">
<xsl:param name="i" />
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="($i mod 3) = 0 and ($i mod 5) = 0">FizzBuzz
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$i mod 3 = 0">Fizz
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$i mod 5 = 0">Buzz
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise><xsl:value-of select="$i" /><xsl:text>
</xsl:text></xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
<xsl:if test="$i < 100">
<xsl:call-template name="FizzBuzz">
<xsl:with-param name="i" select="$i + 1" />
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
That is FizzBuzz in XSLT. I assume it was written in jest, but in many ways, XML and XSLT are better than an ad-hoc YAML based scripting language. XSLT is a documented and standardized thing, not just some ad-hoc format for specifying execution.
It burns my eyes to look at it, but at least XSLT was intended to be used as a programming language. That is something we can’t say about YAML or INTERCAL.
The problem with these languages embedded into YAML is they are all one-off implementations. TravisCI conditionals have a TravisCI specific syntax, usage, and features. You can’t use Travis’s concat function or conditional regex in the YAML configuration for your Ansible playbooks.
In a vague way, this YAML problem is like the COMEFROM problem. If you know YAML, you can’t just open a .yml file and start reading file line by line. You need to understand how the configuration controls the execution of the specific system it’s for. And that is hard.
I HAVE NO FILE AND I MUST SCREAM
The line between configuration and programming languages is not some bright dividing line. It is easy to slowly drift into adding programming language constructs to a config file. Before you know it, you have a full unspecified programming language embedded in the interpretation of your config file.
That is the worst of both worlds, and so much YAML seems to drift into this area.
I like YAML more than XML, but for control flow, you know what would be better than YAML? Anything else! Maybe even INTERCAL? I mean, how bad could a joke programming language be?
(100) PLEASE NOTE THIS IS THE FIZZBUZZ FUNCTION
PLEASE NOTE: IS THE INPUT DIVISIBLE BY #15?
DO .1 <- .100
DO .2 <- #15
DO (2030) NEXT
PLEASE NOTE: is .4 (remainder) == 0?
DO .4 <- '?"'.4~.4'~#1"$#1'~#3
DO (130) NEXT
PLEASE NOTE NUMBER IS NOT DIVISIBLE BY #15 => CHECK IF DIVISIBLE BY #3
DO .2 <- #3
DO (2030) NEXT
PLEASE NOTE: is .4 (remainder) == 0?
DO .4 <- '?"'.4~.4'~#1"$#1'~#3
DO (110) NEXT
PLEASE NOTE NUMBER IS NOT DIVISIBLE BY #3 => CHECK IF DIVISIBLE BY #5
DO .2 <- #5
DO (2030) NEXT
PLEASE NOTE: is .4 (remainder) == 0?
DO .4 <- '?"'.4~.4'~#1"$#1'~#3
DO (120) NEXT
PLEASE NOTE NUMBER IS REGULAR => RETURN THE INPUT
DO .101 <- .100
DO (199) NEXT
(110) DO (111) NEXT
DO FORGET #1
PLEASE NOTE NUMBER IS DIVISIBLE BY #3 => RETURN FIZZ
DO .101 <- #61440
DO (199) NEXT
(120) DO (111) NEXT
DO FORGET #1
PLEASE NOTE NUMBER IS DIVISIBLE BY #5 => RETURN BUZZ
DO .101 <- #45056
DO (199) NEXT
(130) DO (111) NEXT
DO FORGET #1
PLEASE NOTE NUMBER IS DIVISIBLE BY #15 => RETURN FIZZ-BUZZ
DO .101 <- #64256
DO (199) NEXT
(111) DO RESUME .4
(199) DO FORGET #1
DO RESUME #1Oh God.
Well, ok, maybe not INTERCAL but anything else. 3
See my interview with Gabriel Gonzalez on Configuration at Software Engineering Radio.↩︎
Ansible and Helm are actually templating languages built on top of YAML, which is better than embedded control flow, but the point still stands.↩︎
Practically, you may have to use tools that encode a DSL into config, but you can use them while recognizing that we can do better. I think something like Dhall for complicated config and something like Pulumi for complex configuration as code should be where we aim for as an industry.↩︎
