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Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

project-mage.org

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Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#61

Post by some-mthfka »

alexisread wrote: post #47
some-mthfka wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

STEPS is a very interesting project, indeed. I don't think it was quite a failure, after all, they did Nile and Gezira, which was pretty cool (powerful vector graphics rendering in a few hundred lines of code). Someone might reuse those in the future, I don't see why not. But from the limited things that I saw, I got the feeling there was no overarching system. And there was no thinking about flexibility in general (…

Actually there was a lot of thought given to flexibility, I think a lot of the concepts were not exposed well due to the large project scope. Maru (which is the underlying STEPS runtime) for instance was designed to be completely replaceable (See COLA papers) using a composition mechanism similar to fexprs. Maru is also very easily bootstrapped as the VM/runtime and compiler come in at under 2KLOC with all the facili…

Huh, interesting. I should try to learn more about STEPS in general some time...

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#62

Post by herewulf »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #54
some-mthfka wrote: post #2

Hi! I am the author of the project. There's a discussion on Emacs is Not Enough that has been taking place today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137 The Emacs is Not Enough is quite ranty, and its style is not to some people's taste (well, it is kind of a rant, after all). If you want the meat, indeed, please see any other articles on the homepage, or, for an overview of the project, this: https://pro…

I enjoyed Emacs is Not Enough , I think it nailed trying to make it's point on why modern computing is so user hostile. I've sent it to emacs users I know, and they, too, have enjoyed it.

It was a bit of one of those train wrecks that's impossible to tear one's eyes away from. It had me thinking "wait, Emacs could be better?" (I've only been using it for a few years). The Emacs is Not Enough post[1] certainly drew more onlookers with its title than this post though many complained about the length and the focus. Admittedly I think I wouldn't have been intrigued if my first interaction with this project was just the root of the site as linked here. The author has certainly done a good job providing multiple avenues to explain this concept.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#63

Post by herewulf »

vindarel wrote: post #7

It was unclear to me, but some code was written. https://project-mage.org/the-power-of-structure#org63e88da > Fern is the most technical section of the bunch. Perhaps that's because much of it is implemented already (KR, constraints, basic geometry, and linear algebra). and it doesn't do everything from zero, but is somehow based on Garnet > Fern is a spiritual successor to Garnet, a Common Lisp project for building…

I'm looking forward to seeing this appear on Savannah with a corresponding mailing list. Or maybe on Sourcehut? Since the author did leave this tidbit on the Code page:

> As for Savannah being not entirely modern, well, I like the fact that it has a mailing list.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#64

Post by EEMac »

Someone says: "I'm making a new OS/desktop environment/text editor that works for power users."

I hear: "I'm making this for me."

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Many powerful tools came about because people didn't like the way the old one worked.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#65

Post by some-mthfka »

herewulf wrote: post #63
vindarel wrote: post #7

It was unclear to me, but some code was written. https://project-mage.org/the-power-of-structure#org63e88da > Fern is the most technical section of the bunch. Perhaps that's because much of it is implemented already (KR, constraints, basic geometry, and linear algebra). and it doesn't do everything from zero, but is somehow based on Garnet > Fern is a spiritual successor to Garnet, a Common Lisp project for building…

I'm looking forward to seeing this appear on Savannah with a corresponding mailing list. Or maybe on Sourcehut? Since the author did leave this tidbit on the Code page: > As for Savannah being not entirely modern, well, I like the fact that it has a mailing list.

Thanks for mentioning Sourcehut, somehow is just didn't come up when I was researching the mailing list options. So far, looks like it has a really streamlined interface and is meant to be integrated with the mailing list workflow, which I didn't quite see on Savannah.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#66

Post by fsckboy »

ephaeton wrote: post #39
fsckboy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't It Obvious That C Programmers Wrote Git also a bit ranty. It was never made clear how Mage would make what-git-does better. And isn't it obvious that C Programmers also wrote unix, kernels and userspaces?

The way I read this is you write that assuming the reader cherishes unix, kernels and userspaces as opposed to integrated live lisp environments assuming the role of unix, kernels and userspaces, yet without C. Now try looking at the world as someone who does not cherish unix, kernels, userspaces and C programmers' view of the world... [note: I do cherish unix, kernels and userspaces; AND lisp. Oh and C...]

and I cherish lisp, and scheme too... and, of course, C programmers wrote a lot of lisps also :)

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#67

Post by some-mthfka »

mwcampbell wrote: post #14
some-mthfka wrote: post #2

Hi! I am the author of the project. There's a discussion on Emacs is Not Enough that has been taking place today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137 The Emacs is Not Enough is quite ranty, and its style is not to some people's taste (well, it is kind of a rant, after all). If you want the meat, indeed, please see any other articles on the homepage, or, for an overview of the project, this: https://pro…

Have you thought about how your system might be adapted for power users that have accessibility requirements, such as blind people? I'm guessing you'd rather not implement the current GUI accessibility APIs, but would rather have something like Emacspeak that directly implements the alternative UI (e.g. speech output) inside the Lisp environment.

Update: I have updated the power-of-structure article with a section on accessibility.

Copypasting:

It's important to think about issues such as accessibility in advance.

I am basing my knowledge about this issue on this article about Emacspeak.

So, Rune will ask lenses to implement the surface-level text commands. Whatever text is shown or assumed to be on screen, the user will be able to copy that text programmatically. So, you could ask a spec-conformant lens stuff like "get the surface level text of the semantic unit at point". Such functions are of general utility.

Next, Runic functions will be required to return some information about the results of their semantic actions. So, if you issue a delete-semantic-unit command, it will return what it has removed (and that would include the info about the surface level text as well as the data-structural unit itself).

The list of such functions and their return-value properties will all be a part of the spec. So, it will be possible to automatically advice all these spec functions for any given lens to invoke the speech functionality.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#68

Post by some-mthfka »

viksit wrote: post #3
some-mthfka wrote: post #2

Hi! I am the author of the project. There's a discussion on Emacs is Not Enough that has been taking place today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137 The Emacs is Not Enough is quite ranty, and its style is not to some people's taste (well, it is kind of a rant, after all). If you want the meat, indeed, please see any other articles on the homepage, or, for an overview of the project, this: https://pro…

thanks for this! have you thought about hierarchical data structure manipulation in emacs style cl environments? any tools to look at?

I am not sure I understand the question, but, for instance, Lem is an emacs-inspired CL editor. Not structural or even hierarchical though.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#70

Post by some-mthfka »

woolion wrote: post #46

Just a few additional comments from our last exchange, based on https://project-mage.org/elevator . I prefer this elevator pitch because it gives some insight on how to proceed, beyond the stylistic choices. (If not a rant, it's a mixed bag of all I could think about the subject, since I never really exchanged about these ideas, so I'm interested in your thoughts as well.) The example of splitting "Hello world" into…

> eco

The eco article is quite interesting, it's a cool proof-of-concept. I don't know exactly how it compares, but there's also tylr, with an online demo you can check out [1].

> The example of splitting "Hello world" into a list of words is a pretty bad example;

I just wanted to set up some very quick easy-to grasp context with it for the discussion that follows. You are right, of course, the normal editors don't have much trouble with that level of detail. Maybe I will come up with something better later on, though not too complex...

> I'm currently working on knowledge management, which I think you have to split in different subfields;

My view on this is that you can't generally predict that, but what you can do instead is let the user compose the structure and features of custom documents, thus creating custom workflows suitable for the task at hand, whatever it may be. I will be generally taking that approach with Kraken.

> literate programming

I think computational notebooks take the core idea and make it practical, and I think it's fair to say those are literate programs, albeit without the web-tangle aspect.

> Again, good luck etc.

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

[1] https://tylr.fun/

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