Viewing profile — wcrichton

My personal site ( https://willcrichton.net/ ), lab site ( https://cel.cs.brown.edu/ ), and Mastodon page ( https://mastodon.social/@tonofcrates ) are all good ways to follow me!

(Author here) That's exactly why I built this for Rust, and why it's difficult to replicate in any other language.

My issue is that this article is trying to use cognitive load in its specific, academic meaning. It says: > The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. …

I'm not saying that the conclusions in the article are false. As a programmer, I prefer composition to inheritance, too. I'm saying that the justifications are presented using a sc…

The article is attempting to use a scientific term of art, "cognitive load", to justify claims about programming. Those claim cannot be justified given the existing evidence about …

I did my PhD at Stanford about the cognitive aspects of programming, including studies of cognitive load. This article uses pseudoscience to justify folk theories about programming…

Do you believe that you could implement the Airbnb interface without any CSS or Javascript?

Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a f…

Yes, this was my first and probably last experiment using participants from Mechanical Turk. Just too unpredictable.

For the curious, I have done some experiments on working memory and programming: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06305 > Program tracing, or mentally simulating a program on concrete in…

Thanks for the bug report, I will fix that.

Not yet, but that is a high priority TODO. The simplest toolchain is just "Page Print > Save to PDF", but I need to first improve the printer-oriented CSS. There's a broader issue …

Quarto is a good example where their design requires users to understand many different DSLs to achieve the end result. Just in their code sample you have: * YAML for the page meta…

AFAIK Pandoc doesn't really have a story for interaction. Like, "show a tooltip when someone clicks on this text". That's the main value add for Nota. Nota doesn't require users to…

A goal for Nota is to gracefully degrade in the absence of Javascript. This already mostly works, since we do server-side rendering to fully generate the HTML contents of the docum…

Academic writing is definitely a target application area for Nota (since I am an academic). Philosophically, Nota combines together all the ideas I think are needed to make a bette…

Very cool! Yeah that's about the closest thing to Nota I've seen so far. Haven't seen Urlang, I'll have to check that out.

Nota's syntax is heavily inspired by Scribble. You can think about Nota as "web-native Scribble", or "what if Scribble was written in Javascript".

I'm targeting people who are writing documents: bloggers, academics, textbook writers, that sort of thing. Certainly Nota requires a level of technical expertise to use right now, …

Yes, I think course notes or textbooks are a great candidate for Notafication. I sadly don't teach 242 anymore since I just graduated, but I'll certainly use it for my next course.…

Nota is really two things: 1. An alternative syntax (vs. JSX) for writing React programs. 2. A set of React components for structuring a web document As a syntax, Nota is meant to …