Tritium

Tritium (/ˈtrɪtiəm/ or /ˈtrɪʃiəm/; symbol T or 3H, also known as hydrogen-3) is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. The nucleus of tritium (sometimes called a triton) contains one proton and two neutrons, whereas the nucleus of protium (by far the most abundant hydrogen isotope) contains one proton and no neutrons. Naturally occurring tritium is extremely rare on Earth, where trace amounts are formed by the interaction of the atmosphere with cosmic rays. The name of this isotope is formed from the Greek word τρίτος (trítos) meaning "third".

Decay

While tritium has several different experimentally determined values of its half-life, the National Institute of Standards and Technology lists 4,500 ± 8 days (12.32 ± 0.02 years). It decays into helium-3 by beta decay as in this nuclear equation:

and it releases 18.6 keV of energy in the process. The electron's kinetic energy varies, with an average of 5.7 keV, while the remaining energy is carried off by the nearly undetectable electron antineutrino. Beta particles from tritium can penetrate only about 6.0 mm of air, and they are incapable of passing through the dead outermost layer of human skin. The unusually low energy released in the tritium beta decay makes the decay (along with that of rhenium-187) appropriate for absolute neutrino mass measurements in the laboratory (the most recent experiment being KATRIN).

Tritium (programming language)

Tritium is a simple scripting language for efficiently transforming structured data like HTML, XML, and JSON. It is similar in purpose to XSLT but has a syntax influenced by JQuery, Sass, and CSS versus XSLT’s XML based syntax.

History

Tritium was designed by Hampton Catlin, the creator of popular languages Sass and Haml and is currently bundled with the Moovweb mobile platform.

As with Sass (created to address deficiencies in CSS) and Haml (created to address deficiencies in coding HTML templates), Catlin designed Tritium to address issues he saw with XSLT while preserving the core benefits of a transformation language. Much of this was based on his prior experience porting Wikipedia’s desktop website to the mobile web.

Open Tritium is the open source implementation of the Tritium language. It was presented at O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2014 and the compiler is implemented in Go (programming language).

Concept

Tritium takes as input HTML, XML, or JSON documents and outputs HTML, XML, or JSON data that has been transformed according to the rules defined in the Tritium script. Like JQuery, idiomatic Tritium code is structured around selecting a collection of elements via a CSS or XPath selector and then chaining a series of operations on them.