Goodbye ECMAScript; hello UKMAScript!

Posted by Dylan Beattie on 22 March 2017 • permalink

The UK government has announced it will trigger Article 50 on March 29th, beginning the two-year process of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.


That’s right - it will no longer be legal for British web developers to run ECMAScript, since the ECMAScript specification is controlled by the European Computer Manufacturers’ Association. We’re happy to announce that as of today, top engineers are starting work on a superior British programming language called UKMAScript.

UKMAScript will extend the core language specification with the following enhancements, which we believe will provide a massive boost to the UK tech industry and offset the immeasurable damage caused when all our EU colleagues and collaborators decide to exercise their freedom of movement.

  • Along with NaN and Infinity, UKMAScript will support a new primitive numeric value called MoneyForTheNhs, whose value is defined to be exactly 3.5x108 until it’s used as an argument to any function, at which point its value will be silently changed to zero after the function has returned.
  • The Math.round() method will behave as before, except Math.round(0.52) will now return Number.MAX_VALUE. Math.round(0.48) will return a new constant Number.TRAITORS and any attempt to use this value in calculations will throw a TreasonError
  • A new “illogical implication” operator !#> will be introduced. This is syntactically similar to the notion of logical implication in Boolean algebra, but designed to allow the scope of arguments to be massively exaggerated. For example, the statement (leave_eu !#> leave_customs_union && leave_eea) will implicitly bind the values of leave_customs_union and leave_eea to the value of leave_eu, despite this dependency not being expressed anywhere else in the codebase.
  • Along with null and undefined, a new language primitive brexit will be introduced. This has the special equality semantics (brexit == brexit) == undefined. typeof(brexit) will return the value “hard”, and attempting to evaluate brexit.valueOf() will throw a TreasonError.
  • UKMAScript features a new parallel programming paradigm implemented via the Referendum.Invoke() method. This causes a thread to break away from the main sequence of program control and attempt to continue execution despite no longer having access to any processing capabilities or shared resources of the host system. Note that if a thread A has called Referendum.Invoke(), any child process B attempting to call Referendum.Invoke() will be summarily ignored by process A on the grounds that it’s clearly developed a fault.

UKMAScript ships with no standard library or runtime, but the UKMAScript language committee assures us that platform vendors are lining up to deliver first-class support for the new language.

To further promote the popularity of UKMAScript, the only alternative permitted once Article 50 has been invoked is a new language called LABOUR, which takes many of the core language principles of COBOL-64 but is only accessible using the GNU/Corbyn compiler. This compiler has a tremendously exciting installation routine but then doesn’t actually do anything other than occasionally create internal process deadlocks for no reason.