TXR – A Programming Language for Convenient Data Munging

This seemed interesting, but when I went through the "Accepted Stack Overflow" links on the main page, I thought "how would I do this in an R tidyverse stack?" and set the goal that my responses should be shorter, clearer, or ideally both, and that I would favour clearer answers to code golf, except that when posting to HN I collapse the code into a single line while in R there would be linebreaks at each semicolon or after each pipe operator (%>%). Here are three examples below:

"Customized sort based on multiple columns of CSV". In R, something like this: `library(tidyverse); read_delim("file.tsv", delim = "@") %>% arrange(.[[2]]) %>% group_by(.[[2]]) %>% arrange(match(.[[3]], c("arch.", "var." "ver.", "anci.", "fam.")), .[[3]]) %>% group_by(.[[2]], .[[3]]) %>% mutate(n = n()) %>% arrange(desc(n)) %>% ungroup() %>% select(1:4)`

"Extract text from HTML table". In R, something like this would suffice: `library(rvest); library(tidyverse); read_html(URL_GOES_HERE) %>% html_nodes("div.scoreTableArea") %>% html_table() %>% write_delim("out.csv", delim = "\t")`

"Get n-th Field of Each Create Referring to Another File". In R: `library(tidyverse); file1 = read_delim("file1.txt", delim = " ", col_names = FALSE); chunks = readChar("file2.txt", 999999) %>% str_split(";") %>% unlist() %>% map(function(x) { matches = str_match(str_trim(x), '^create table "(.)"([^(])\\(((.|\n)*)\\)$'); title = matches[, 2]; fields = matches[, 4] %>% str_split(",") %>% unlist() %>% str_trim(); return(tibble(table_name = rep(title, length(fields)), n = 1:length(fields), field = fields)) }) %>% bind_rows(); file1 %>% left_join(chunks, by = c("X1" = "table_name", "X2" = "n"))`

The third example trades off a little clarity for a little robustness by adding a regex instead of assuming the SQL table definition is one field per line.

i agree that the general-purpose programming language space is fairly crowded ... the lisp dialect/user ratio especially so.

DSLs, otoh, are in short supply. while awk or plain sed are great for shell programming, this is the only (open source) DSL i'm aware of targeting certain types of NLP-esque "munging". this space is mostly full of statistical approaches, which, while conceptually pure, don't allow the kind of flexibility that would be useful in many applications.

i wonder if, eventually, the DSL portion of TXR could be sheared off (possibly via metacircular evaluation of the TXR lisp?) into something that's portable across lisps or at least to semi-standardized scheme implementations?

The "no index or TOC" isn't being touted as a feature, just that the page count is that without these (in documents like these, these features can contribute dozens to the page count). An index would be nice; patches welcome!

The HTML version that most people would be using has a TOC with two-way navigation to the section headings and is hyperlinked. Of course, man page reading allows easy searching.

Confusingly, there's another language called TXL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXL_(programming_language)) that's both obscure and neat.

Good heads up. This background (if it is to exist at all) should be done properly as an alpha blend, not as a transparency with opaque off-white pixels, so that it works with various backgrounds. I will look into it.