Everything Is an X (2020)

Haskell is a relatively poor example of a &quot;Everything is an X&quot; language. There are a lot of different kinds of things in the language that aren&#x27;t all that uniform. Coffeescript out of all things was more in the &quot;everything is an expression&quot; sort of boat.<p>Ruby on the other hand is a good example of an &quot;Everything is an Object&quot; language, as it seems to be pretty consistent about that.

Missed one: On a computer, everything is a binary string. It&#x27;s zeros and ones all the way down.<p>While I think it simplifies the electrical engineering in that it provides consistency*, I don&#x27;t think it provides a good interface. The problem is that there are lots of totally arbitrary ways of encoding different objects as binary strings; and lots of nonsense operations you can do on those strings. Maybe the other examples in the list are similar.<p>I think another relevant quote is: &quot;It&#x27;s better to have fifty functions over one type, instead of fifty types with one function each.&quot;<p>* - which is the main concern for EEs anyway

Previous Discussion:<p>Everything Is an X (November 12, 2020)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25078209" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25078209</a>

I&#x27;m usually a big fan of this pattern, but I think one of the biggest examples how not to do it are browsers and the &quot;everything is hypertext&quot; paradigm.<p>Browser UI still pretends we&#x27;re in the 90s and every website is mostly text with some hyperlinks intermitted and possibly some fancy formatting using CSS. This is why the only UI primitives a browser presents natively are selecting text, printing and navigating backwards and forwards.<p>Nevermind that many webpages are sprawling applications by now, which frequently reinvent UI elements and display all kinds of complex entities. But for the browser UI, it&#x27;s still all just text and fancy formatting.

&gt;Emacs: everything is a buffer.<p>This was taken from TECO, the editor on which it was prototyped. TECO had 36 Q-registers A-Z,0-9, which are essentially text buffers

I first head &quot;everything is a(n)&quot; in terms of Ruby: &quot;everything is an object.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s an interesting thing to say in terms of the possibilities you get in that language, even if it is clearly false, think of the assignment operator for example. You can&#x27;t do something like:<p><pre><code> =.to_str </code></pre> because <i>=</i> is not an object, it&#x27;s syntax.