fructure

https://github.com/disconcision/fructure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA

Even the racket teachpack libraries designed for education are very capable; I was able to make this structured editor with only using teachpack content without external deps: https://github.com/disconcision/fructure

Right, it's fine, and is a pretty basic macro. Doubly linked lists are pretty basic data structures too, even the Rust versions once you figure it out. I like your sibling comment making it look like the CL version. I still want to know in more detail though why you think that doing things this way instead of the CL way is less likely to be "fragile and break down" for the complicated stuff, it would help to have a specific complicated example to showcase. Perhaps the linked https://github.com/disconcision/fructure in another comment would be a good study? The author there claimed they might not have been able to manage with defmacro, maybe someone familiar with both could articulate the challenges in detail. Is it just an issue of some things benefit a lot from pattern matching, and if so, does using CL's Trivia system mitigate that at a

> all large Racket programs were written by people with PhD's from Northwestern not totally wrong but i did write this https://github.com/disconcision/fructure with ~2 years programming experience. implementation features some nice simple define-syntax-rule macros which i maybe never wouldve managed with defmacro

The problem with regular programming is that you can see the code but not the data, and the problem with spreadsheets is that you can see the data but not the code. You might be on to something with the “apply” idea. What if there was a split screen where you could see both code/operations and data and could mix them together with all the transparency of a spreadsheet? macros would just exploit code as data? For a tangent that might spark interesting ideas, check out this structure editor project in Racket (a lisp) https://github.com/disconcision/fructure

> s-edit https://interlisp.org/ shouldn't be hard > more https://github.com/disconcision/fructure Partly inspired by hazel, less active but probably a more broadly appealing language.

Better example: https://github.com/disconcision/fructure

>you could imagine that touching a form makes a dialog appear or something like that Fructure might be nice on a phone! Currently makes heavy use of keyboard shortcuts but I bet it could be adapted to a touchscreen. https://github.com/disconcision/fructure

> You spend a lot of time talking about code formatting. The more mature teams I’ve worked with have settled on a format and use linters to identify deviations. From my perspective, that is a non-issue. Formatting is not a major part of the result, it is just a nice side effect; I didn't mean to give it so much attention. I will not say, however, that formatting is a non-issue. It isn't an important issue, but it is one that a disappointing number of man-hours have been spent thinking about. Just look at all the comments and controversy on this ticket about zig not supporting tabs: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544. Consider how much time has been spent making auto-formatters, and making them preserve things like comment alignment. There are 'less mature teams'; what will you do for them? > I can type characters much faster t

So I wrote a projectional/structure editor[1] that does this sort of nested tiles representation. The reason for it wasn't to teach syntax though, it was to provide users with bigger, easier to interact with UI elements (reasons below). I wanted the basic elements of the interface to be at a higher level than individual characters. The nested squares style rendering is highlighting grammatical structures in the language—not to teach syntax, but just to indicate where an interactable UI element is, the same way you have rectangular bounds around a button etc. My motivation for this was to make it easier to manipulate code with lower-precision input devices (e.g. the microsoft kinect / leap motion), but I think there is general interest because a lot of the people writing these editors start from the premise that interacting with the AST di