
8th – A secure, cross-platform, concatenative programming language - marttt
https://8th-dev.com
======
MrMorden
Let's look at the license ([https://8th-dev.com/com-license.html](https://8th-
dev.com/com-license.html)):

"Except as otherwise specifically permitted in this Agreement, you may not:
[...] (h) publish any results of benchmark tests run on the Software to a
third party without Licensor’s prior written consent"

So we know that it's slow as crap, which is especially problematic given the
author's claims of suitability for embedded development, and the author also
thinks that nobody's going to notice. (What's next, an NDA to get the proposed
license?) There's not a big enough cup to hold all the nope.

~~~
xelxebar
Would this be likely to hold up in court at all? It seems like this kind of
thing would fall under the purview of defamation law, and benchmarks are
essentially "just facts" so about as safe as you can get. I imagine they'd
have to show that you maliciously construed the benchmark itself or something
to make any case stick.

~~~
unixhero
A license is an obligation the user falls under legally when taking official
use of a software.

~~~
xelxebar
Sure, but licences are not free to obligate anything at all. A lincense cannot
legally obligate otherwise illegal behaviour, for example. It just wouldn't
hold up in court. My question is about how far licenses can circumscribe non-
illegal behaviour.

There are clear pathological cases that probably wouldn't hold up in court
either. What if a software contract says that you must turn over your first
born child? I image that the software company would have to provide some very
good reasons for including such a clause.

So, how far can a license actually go?

------
RandomBK
Some questions:

* I see many claims of "cross-platform", but not a lot of substance to back it up. The FAQ is odd as well - it makes many claims that are simply not true.

* Given that you chose to keep the source closed, what guarantees will I have that your language will continue to be supported if the company collapses?

* What are you offering in a paid language that isn't already provided by an open alternative?

* What is the state of the standard library or library ecosystem? Will I end up writing my own dependencies?

Edit: Prior discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10344891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10344891)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3nthud/the_8th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3nthud/the_8th_programming_language_one_effort_multiple/?ref=share&ref_source=link)

------
justinpombrio
It has testimonials:

[https://8th-dev.com/kudos.html](https://8th-dev.com/kudos.html)

And eight pillars:

[https://8th-dev.com/about8th.html](https://8th-dev.com/about8th.html)

There's also a very detailed manual, that for some reason is hard to find on
the website:

[https://8th-dev.com/manual.pdf](https://8th-dev.com/manual.pdf)

~~~
RandomBK
Anonymous testimonials aren't worth the screen space they take up, especially
coupled with the pathetic list of customers on the website.

------
cordite
Been said on other HN-announced languages.. but good luck having a search
engine find relevant results for that language name.

------
beaconstudios
did you google the name before deciding on it? The term "8th" already has a
well-established association that you might not want attached to your company:

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=8th](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=8th)

------
yellowapple
There are lots of free-and-open-source languages already. A proprietary one
seems like a non-starter to me.

~~~
TeddyDD
Yeah, I can't imagine who would risk using this in production.

------
deckar01
> 8th lets you choose, and offers strong protection if needed. ... The build
> tool compress your program code and all its required bits and pieces into a
> ZIP-format blob which is unpacked, compiled and run on the device when
> needed. It is difficult to modify the ZIP-data without corrupting the
> deployment package.

I'm afraid to ask how the paid encryption works.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Also, unless they're doing something interesting, zips really aren't hard to
modify. See also: Android APKs, also just fancy zip files, also easy to modify
(though, granted, you have to re-sign the result).

------
aidenn0
So I take it's supposed to be "twice as good as forth?"

~~~
craftyguy
1/8th is 1/2 as much as 1/4th

------
vortico
Code example? Also, being a cross platform GUI as well, how does it compare
with GTK, Qt (backed by a much larger company Nokia), Tk, etc.?

~~~
zokier
> Qt (backed by a much larger company Nokia)

Digia actually.

~~~
vortico
Looks like we're both out of date! (Although I was more out of date.) It's now
the Qt Company since 2014.

------
zokier
I wonder how much money they would be willing to bet on their big claims of
security. Somehow I don't imagine it would last long in the hands of a
dedicated individual.

[https://8th-dev.com/security.html](https://8th-dev.com/security.html)

------
maxpert
At the risk of sounding negative may I ask, why would I even use a platform
with really shady testimonials ( [https://8th-dev.com/kudos.html](https://8th-
dev.com/kudos.html) ) and something that might have no future?

------
mncharity
[http://concatenative.org/](http://concatenative.org/) language wiki.

Nice to see the Factor repo is still getting commits.

------
fabiofzero
If it isn't open source it doesn't matter.

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phren0logy
From the FAQ:

>The main reason 8th is not GPL licensed is that I (Ron) have strong
philosophical objections to being forced to give away my intellectual
property. I disagree with the very tenet that "code should be free" in the GPL
sense. Instead, I am of the opinion that you are free to have access to the
8th source code if you are willing to pay for that privilege. If not, not.

>A secondary reason we do not follow the "open source" idea is that, frankly,
over the many years we have used open-source projects, we have been struck by
the simple fact that a great many of those projects are maintained only to the
extent the author decides to do so. Thus for example, the venerable "gcc"
compiler has severe bugs which were reported many years ago, but which will
probably never be fixed. This, despite the fact that the code for it is
available and anyone could fix it at will. Nobody has, probably nobody will --
because the gcc code is extraordinarily difficult to grok. So the "many eyes"
argument for open-source and GPL is not overly convincing to me.

~~~
zem
on one hand, yes, I support their right to do whatever they want with their
product. on the other hand, as a user I am not willing to invest any time or
attention in a closed source language.

also, having seen that philosophy essentially kill qi/shen, I am sceptical of
it as a general approach. might work for some niches like game dev.

~~~
TurboHaskal
What killed Qi/Shen? Didn't M. Tarver end up open sourcing it with a BSD like
license to end up with nobody actually giving a f?

~~~
zem
yes, but there seems to be a certain window of opportunity for new language
where they have enough mindshare for lots of early adopters to check them out,
and if there are any barriers to adoption at that point the crowd tends to
move on to the next new thing. sadly, fixing things later doesn't seem to
work, though I wish it would. I can immediately think of shen, rebol and D as
languages that have not done nearly as well as one might expect based purely
on what they offered to PL enthusiasts, and I am sure there are lots more.

~~~
mncharity
> lots more

Poplog - a hydra of Common Lisp, Standard ML, Prolog, and POP-11. Late 1980's,
early 1990's, it seemed like it could change the world. With dreams of riches,
it was kept closed source and commercial. It made a few million... and is dead
and forgotten. Gotta wonder what the world might be like now, if they'd chosen
glory over riches.

------
feelin_googley
"He developed the well respected Reva Forth, used by hobbyists around the
world. "

Reva Forth always seemed nice but I could never get it working on anything
other than Windows.

As such, I have little faith that "8th" will place any value on portability
either, e.g., that it will be ported to BSD, Plan 9 or other RPi-compatible
OS.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of more portable, open source Forths to choose
from.

Example:

    
    
        ftp -4o cforthu.zip https://codeload.github.com/pahihu/cforthu/zip/master
    

Some HN commenters are questioning the peculiar security claims.

The author discloses that 8th depends on a number of third party libraries.
Would this mean that each of those third parties would also have to make
similar security claims to 8th?

For example, 8th uses an HTML5 parsing library from Google called gumbo-
parser.

"Non-goals:

Security. Gumbo was initially designed for a product that worked with trusted
input files only. We're working to harden this and make sure that it behaves
as expected even on malicious input, but for now, Gumbo should only be run on
trusted input or within a sandbox. Gumbo underwent a number of security fixes
and passed Google's security review as of version 0.9.1."

source: [https://github.com/google/gumbo-
parser](https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser)

It may be the case the only input parsed by 8th is trusted or "within a
sandbox" but without the source code how would this be verified?

------
ttul
Wow, a closed source language. Good luck with that.

~~~
giancarlostoro
C# was close sourced for many years. It's who backs up the language, the
tooling, the standard out of the box libraries, and documentation that makes a
big difference in deciding the lifespan of a language. Then speed, stability
etc (not in that order)

~~~
nathan_long
Are any languages _currently_ closed source and still popular?

~~~
macintux
#8 on the tiobe index is VB .NET which is, I think, still closed source?

#11 is Delphi/Object Pascal.

MATLAB.

Not much else.

~~~
FRex
Whether or not 'Delphi/Object Pascal' includes the largely compatible Lazarus
+ LCL + Free Pascal combo is a very big question here. Just 'Delphi' would be
clearer, FPC refers to itself as an 'Open source compiler for Pascal and
Object Pascal' : [https://www.freepascal.org/](https://www.freepascal.org/)

Because of FPC, arguably, if you use Delphi you're not exactly stuck in the
unlikely event that it dies since in the worst case there is Free Pascal to
move to, LCL and Lazarus (although I have no idea how it compares to modern
late 2010s era Delphi and RAD Studio but it's at least something). Delphi also
has a more or less proven track record, costs a lot, is pretty much enterprise
tier item and has a multi million company behind it.

I'd argue Object Pascal is not a closed language but a language that has few
implementations, one major open one (FPC) and one major closed one (Delphi)
and that the situation is even better than C# vs. Mono was, since Mono had a
murky legal/patent situation (or maybe it was FUD, I'm not too into C#) and
the situation was basically 'closed language with a closed implementation that
happens to have an open implementation' while FPC and Delphi are more like
brothers with Delphi not 'owning' the concept of Object Pascal in itself nor
any patents that could threaten it in any way AFAIK.

------
Brian_K_White
This has less import to the world than a cat video. Never getting that 5
minutes back.

