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Pretty Lisp

pretty-lisp.org

11–20 of 115 posts

Re: Pretty Lisp

#11
Nice. Gotta admit that I was slightly disappointed that the client-side JS didn't appear to be ClojureScript or some lispy-script generated...

The application seems like a very good place to do Lisp-everywhere. In particular and because of the ability to modify the interpreter, it would be awesome to be able to use pretty-lisp client to edit the server-side code and see immediate changes.

Re: Pretty Lisp

#12
post #8

Something I'd be curious to hear from the pretty lisp designers: what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block? By way of context, I was a test subject for a perhaps related project called Code Bubbles http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp a while ago. Since it was for Java, a language whi…

> what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block?

This already exists: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el

(you can see a screenie in http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png)

Re: Pretty Lisp

#13
post #5
post #2

I've been wanting this sort of thing for ages. Considering how sophisticated we think we are, how the hell are we still using tools like emacs, or even VS on a daily basis? We should be indistinguishable from magic by now. This is a (small) step in the right direction. Can we please live in the future already?

Emacs is already indistinguishable from magic :). Seriously though, I actually prefer working with text, even here. Also, I think this could be improved by making "meta" symbols like defun into different shapes rather than just including them as words. So a definition would look like a different box than a normal statement. Probably the same for &optional. Of course, this wouldn't work for user-defined macros or func…

Oh, that's a nice idea. I have to admit that the boxes don't do much for me, but symbols would make it easier to see what's where.

Re: Pretty Lisp

#14
post #9

Looking sweet. The future is in structural editors. The client-server separation is a nice bonus. Unfortunately this is running up against the UI problem. How do you make this intuitive and powerful? A lot of hard work on usability is needed to get up to par with text editors. Very glad to see it being tackled.

> The future is in structural editors.

I liked CodeBubbles, but do you have any other examples of structural editors for generic programming? Obviously, UI-centric editors and LabView are structural editors, but for very specific domains.

Re: Pretty Lisp

#15
post #3
post #2

I've been wanting this sort of thing for ages. Considering how sophisticated we think we are, how the hell are we still using tools like emacs, or even VS on a daily basis? We should be indistinguishable from magic by now. This is a (small) step in the right direction. Can we please live in the future already?

Seconded. I made some designs for a graphical IDE like this years ago, but only on paper. I'm very happy to see someone else has done the hard work for me! I hope they'll support other languages too.

It's funny, more and more I'm moving my work to Mathematica because it works sort of like this already. That, and it's as far along the power curve from python/ruby as python/ruby is from C.

Re: Pretty Lisp

#16
post #8

Something I'd be curious to hear from the pretty lisp designers: what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block? By way of context, I was a test subject for a perhaps related project called Code Bubbles http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp a while ago. Since it was for Java, a language whi…

> what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block? This already exists: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el (you can see a screenie in http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png )

That is extremely shiny. Can I get that in Vim?

Re: Pretty Lisp

#17
post #9

Looking sweet. The future is in structural editors. The client-server separation is a nice bonus. Unfortunately this is running up against the UI problem. How do you make this intuitive and powerful? A lot of hard work on usability is needed to get up to par with text editors. Very glad to see it being tackled.

> The future is in structural editors. I liked CodeBubbles, but do you have any other examples of structural editors for generic programming? Obviously, UI-centric editors and LabView are structural editors, but for very specific domains.

EastWest is one that comes to mind.

I aim to write one, but that's a long time coming.

Re: Pretty Lisp

#18
post #9

Looking sweet. The future is in structural editors. The client-server separation is a nice bonus. Unfortunately this is running up against the UI problem. How do you make this intuitive and powerful? A lot of hard work on usability is needed to get up to par with text editors. Very glad to see it being tackled.

In the lisp universe the future was in the 80's, thats when we tried the whole "structural editors" idea and concluded that they didn't work out as nicely as we hoped. I believe the sgml people tried them too, with poor results as well.

Re: Pretty Lisp

#20
post #8

Something I'd be curious to hear from the pretty lisp designers: what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block? By way of context, I was a test subject for a perhaps related project called Code Bubbles http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp a while ago. Since it was for Java, a language whi…

> what advantages do you feel this offers over an Emacs which just highlights the symbol of interest or region between the matched parens for a particular code block? This already exists: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el (you can see a screenie in http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png )

Thank you. I knew that it was an editor feature I'd seen before for lisp code, but didn't recall the name of any one in particular.
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