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Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

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Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#41

Have you heard of dion? https://media.handmade-seattle.com/dion-systems/ It's still in the category of "inserting text with the keyboard", but the underlying representation of the "program" isn't raw text. The text is just a user interface for a more complicated representation.

Their website is `dion.systems`.

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#42
Hazel[0] is really fascinating!

"Hazel is a live functional programming environment that is able to typecheck, manipulate, and even run incomplete programs, i.e. programs with holes. There are no meaningless editor states."

It's a programming language and IDE that's fully integrated with the semantics of the language. I saw the demo at Strange Loop in 2019[1], and it was really cool to see the interactive, dialogue-esque development workflow that I love from super dynamic lisps - but working with a strong, statically, dependently typed language. It reminded me of Idris, but even more integrated.

[0]https://hazel.org/ [1]https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2018/hazel-a-live-functional-...

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#43

Have you heard of dion? https://media.handmade-seattle.com/dion-systems/ It's still in the category of "inserting text with the keyboard", but the underlying representation of the "program" isn't raw text. The text is just a user interface for a more complicated representation.

https://github.com/dion-systems/metadesk seems to be the repo for their prototype.

It seems like it's vaguely similar to SGML but with small but significant differences: instead of blah blah you say a: "blah blah", the node labels can be user data instead of just structure, attribute values are full subtrees instead of just strings, and attributes syntactically precede the node, so you say @foo(bar) baz instead of .

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#44
Light Table [1,2] attracted a lot of attention here [3] several years ago. The author went on to make another system called Eve [4].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Table_(software)

2. https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable

3. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=light+table

4. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=eve+chris+granger

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#46
JetBrains MPS [0] is worth a look for inspiration. Like some of the other projects mentioned here, it's an editor on top of an Abstract Syntax Tree. You can use it to make DSLs that have different UI/UX projections.

I'm not sure anyone's actually using it, but there are some good ideas in there.

[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#48

Have you heard of dion? https://media.handmade-seattle.com/dion-systems/ It's still in the category of "inserting text with the keyboard", but the underlying representation of the "program" isn't raw text. The text is just a user interface for a more complicated representation.

The makers of Dion now work at Epic. My guess is they're contributing to Verse [0], a new programming language (environment?) being worked on at Epic, which could be of interest to people in this thread.

Verse is believed to include ideas from SkookumScript, which Epic acquired [1], and Simon Peyton Jones, a main contributor to Haskell [2].

[0] https://twitter.com/saji8k/status/1339709691564179464?s=20

[1] https://skookumscript.com/blog/2019/01-23-epic-aquires-agog/

[2] https://discourse.haskell.org/t/an-epic-future-for-spj/3573

Re: Ask HN: More “experimental” UIs for editing/writing code?

#50
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

If you don't want open source developers to starve, you damn well put your money where your mouth is. High quality open source software is worth paying for. The times when open source software is a niche cottage industry powered by volunteers are long gone. Time is not free, and software does not grow on trees (despite what overprivileged lisp users may claim).

I agree with you, but nothing you said precludes copyleft.
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