This is along the right lines. Whoever cracks end-user programming will be someone who embraces lists, and is willing throw away the vast vast majority of modern programming language-y control structures.<p>Lists of strings + function calls + function definitions, that gets you pretty far. Anything that tries to reach much beyond that will fail. Function definitions are probably just lists of strings. Deeply nested statements are probably counterproductive.<p>I think even IF statements are probably not necessary. Comparison operators plus function calls get you conditionals and so much more.
I'd like to see this self-contained. It looks like if I want to share a mesh with someone, I need them to be familiar with developer build processes (needing npm or yarn, etc; and including having Electron installed? not sure yet, since I haven't been able to try it out and poke at it yet—my case in point, really)<p>I'd rather be able to send anyone my-data.mesh.html, they double click it, it opens in their browser, they can modify it at will, and there's a button that's functionally equivalent to a Save button to let them overwrite the orginal file. (Like a quine on steroids. Think TiddlyWiki.) This can be done, the only problem is that you don't get the typical Ctrl+S workflow—you use the in-page button instead, and it wouldn't let you get around the "Save As" dialog, but I'm thinking it should be only a minor nuisance.<p>If you do it right, you could even standardize your serialization so that other tools could ingest a meshfile.<p>This is really neat, and I'm going to play with it tomorrow.
It looks nice and all... but what can I do with it? Citing Paul Graham[0] You Need an Application to Drive the Design of a Language.<p>What is the use case here? The readme describes vaguely that it's more suited to arbitrary length data processing and generation... but I can't come up with a practical example for which this IDE is applicable. I wish the developer would showcase SOMETHING besides the base interactions. Anyone have any ideas?<p>[0] <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html</a>
Things I could use that for that I can think of right now:
- fast prototyping of regexes
- very good prototyping and feedback tool for record processing
- computational graphics (plots, barcodes)
- state machines
And I bet many more.
Very straightforward tool, and nicely done.
This is neat. I've made some small prototypes in the same kind of space, trying to come up with a new way of doing spreadsheet-based programming.<p>My one nitpick is that I want to be able to just try it in my browser right now. Oh also you really need a target project with something like this. In other words, you need problem you are trying to solve, so that you can know once you've solved it.
That would make a great combination with the 2D syntax [1] discussed here a few weeks ago [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.racket-lang.org/2d/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.racket-lang.org/2d/index.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14657857" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14657857</a>
I use and love Calca which is a maths oriented text editor that does live display of equation results as you type. I really wish that more programming were like this: real-time feeling, high feedback. It's a great model for exploratory stuff and I often use it in place of spreadsheets<p>This is a cool project, I'm excited to see where it goes
Amazing.<p>But it seems like a powerful way to process data, not a way to write programs, am I right?<p>Maybe it could be said to be a spreadsheet-like data processor that generates Javascript code to process that data in that same way.<p>I hope I remember to install and try it when I get home.
something that converts an excel spreadsheet to code might be pretty useful - since most businesses run on crappy excel spreadsheets, having something that occasionally converts one to code could go a long way in "scaling" business.