JetBrains

MPS

JetBrains MPS2018–2024

JetBrains / MPS

MPS

JetBrains Meta programming System

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2Distinct people

6Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1.7KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

JetBrains Meta programming System

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

jetbrains/intellij-community · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-01-05 06:38:43 UTC to 2024-11-03 17:19:39 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

6 sources

mdaniel·Nov 3, 2024

I also believe this, and we're actually about half way there via MPS <https://github.com/JetBrains/MPS#readme> but I'm pretty sure that dream is dead until this LLM hype blows over, since LLMs are not going to copy-paste syntax trees until the other dream of a universal representation materializes[1] 1: There have been several attempts at Universal ASTs, including (unsurprisingly) a JVM-centric one from JetBrains https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/24...

In Weird Lexical Syntax

mdaniel·Jul 8, 2024

> - no syntax errors --- if things fit together/connect, then it should be a syntactically valid program for consideration, one need not change the encoding medium to achieve this: JetBrains MPS <https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/#:~:text=Why%20MPS> (Apache 2 licensed: https://github.com/JetBrains/MPS ) is like a middle ground between "flashing cursor in a textarea" and "drag-and-drop programming" and they alleged to have written their bugtracker (YouTrack) using MPS but they have since removed the citation in the footer so I don't know if it was true or is true

In Unit is a general purpose visual programming system

mdaniel·Oct 12, 2022

The article name-checks IJ, but they have a separate projectional language workbench: https://github.com/JetBrains/MPS#readme Allegedly early version of their issue tracker were written in it, so it's apparently been used in anger and TIL that GitHub even tracks "JetBrains MPS" as a recognized language: https://github.com/search?q=mps+language%3A%22JetBrains+MPS%...

In Projectional Editing (2008)

cr0sh·May 23, 2019

> Is there a college lab or a research department or some other place where people are trying really different things? From a UI perspective, I've found this to be very innovative and interesting - but I'm not sure how practical it is: https://dynamicland.org/ ...and in a more open fashion and inspired by it: https://paperprograms.org/ Both of these appear to be something known as "tangible user interfaces" - or are a subset of such; if you google around, you'll find a ton of research on such systems. A similar kind of interface is the "augmented reality sandbox": https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/ And indeed AR is a part of all of this; but rather than wearing a headset (or using a phone) to overlay virtual objects or such on the real world, instead projectors are used, which in effect makes it easier to use and more natural, while also allo

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wing for easier collaboration. I have a theory that LISP or a LISP-inspired language (perhaps LOGO) might also be something that could be incorporated into a new system (I honestly believe that both of these languages haven't been as fully explored as they deserve - LOGO moreso than LISP). Lastly - the idea of a DSL (Domain Specific Language) might also have relevance to a new paradigm; I've mentioned this particular offering in the past: https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ https://github.com/JetBrains/MPS I'm only as familiar with it as what I've read about it, both on JetBrains site and elsewhere, but it looks both interesting and promising.

In SerenityOS – a graphical Unix-like OS for x86, with 90s aesthetics

cr0sh·May 22, 2019

I've never used it, but based on what I have read about it, this language seems fairly radical (well, not completely - LISP could be considered a prototypical form?): https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ It is open-source, too: https://github.com/JetBrains/MPS It seems to have active development, and - interesting aside - it is written in Java. But again - it purports to do what you seem to be explaining here, and a bit more: It's a system that lets the programmer define the programming language as they use that same language, for the specific purpose at hand (aka, DSL - Domain Specific Language). As I've noted - I've not used this tool, but I've kept it in the back of my mind as the concept seems very fascinating to me (I don't know if it is practical, workable, or anything else - but I do think it's a "neat" idea).

In Alan Kay and OO Programming

mdaniel·Jan 5, 2018

embed vim as their text editor Part of that problem is that a really good IDE isn't editing text: it's editing code. One may retort "but code is stored in text files," and yes, that happens to be the primary serialization format but while it's in RAM the editor is making changes to the AST (for example)[1] and the MPS project[2] even strives to do away with "text file" façade entirely, allowing you to edit the parts that are truly editable, and just graphically render the syntatic sugar for everything else. That distinction is relevant to the question because merely embedding vim would be problematic since the common language spoken between the IDE's mental model and vim's mental model is text, but I couldn't imagine the pain that would be involved in trying to send down the keystrokes required to update all occurrences of a variable, for

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example. IntelliJ does have emacs bindings, and does have a vim plugin, but I've watched people use both of them and they suffer from the uncanny valley effect. Not to mention the fact that, and I can't stress this enough, entering character level keyboard shortcuts to change an AST is optimizing the wrong problem. that can do something like that is emacs I've actually spent many, many hours thinking about that very issue, and I am 100% convinced in my soul that a sufficiently determined person could in fact make Emacs as smart as IntelliJ. But the problem isn't making it that smart, it's keeping it up to date with the new bugfixes and rules. It might be possible (heh, or even preferable!) to write the AST manipulation and inspection rules using (e)lisp, but given how many developers know Java versus how many know lisps, I doubt a commercial company would bet the farm on such a thing. --- 1 = https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/17... 2 = https://github.com/JetBrains/MPS/tree/2017.3.2#jetbrains-mps

In Frontmacs