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Thanks for the reply meredydd. That does seem like a good approach. Actually, I spent 1.5 years building an editor in this style (see link in my original post

Thanks for the reply meredydd. That does seem like a good approach. Actually, I spent 1.5 years building an editor in this style (see link in my original post here) while working at a grocery store :) Unfortunately, while I can see now that I should have first been super focused on validating the concept—I instead just kind of ran with it, assuming it was going to work, and built this massive, probably over-engineered, framework for generating editors for given grammars (with my starting point being: not even knowing what a grammar was, thinking I'd have to invent some kind of 'linguistic constraint description' format ;) ). As it stands the editing portion works well enough for a demo, but the program never reached the point where I could write code with it, so a lot of these questions are still un answered for me. I think doing the paper prototype on these edit actions would be a good pre-coding validation step. I did check out Anvil briefly. My two second, potentially incorrect summary would be VB for web apps. Is that close? Are you guys doing anything special for working with text itself?

meredydd 10y ago
"VB for web apps" is a fair summary. We made a conscious decision against anything AST-based (for the reasons I outlined above), and we're about to deploy an Intellisense-style autocompleter instead. Our general philosophy is that coding is fine - it's the web/Javascript ecosystem that's the problem. We fix that, then get out of the way and let you write code :) As for validating one's side projects before starting work - I personally think the Lean Startup thing can be taken a bit far. An interesting leisure-time technical project doesn't need the same level of prior justification as a big commercial project (even if it might one day evolve into one), as long as you're having fun. We do this stuff because we enjoy it!
- westoncb 10y ago
  > it's the web/Javascript ecosystem that's the problem. I agree—that's definitely the bigger issue. I think differences between editors and languages tend to be overblown in general. Unfortunately the project for me was not quite a fun thing: I ran into an issue with mouse/keyboard overuse, so I was trying to build an editor that could work efficiently with motion sensors. In the meantime, coding was painful :/ I'm still looking for an alternative for that reason—but VR and mobile also have needs for efficient editors that can be operated with fewer unique symbols. Also, another solution to the AST editor issue: just convert any non-parsing nodes into plain text nodes until they're fixed.

meredydd 10y ago

"VB for web apps" is a fair summary. We made a conscious decision against anything AST-based (for the reasons I outlined above), and we're about to deploy an Intellisense-style autocompleter instead. Our general philosophy is that coding is fine - it's the web/Javascript ecosystem that's the problem. We fix that, then get out of the way and let you write code :) As for validating one's side projects before starting work - I personally think the Lean Startup thing can be taken a bit far. An interesting leisure-time technical project doesn't need the same level of prior justification as a big commercial project (even if it might one day evolve into one), as long as you're having fun. We do this stuff because we enjoy it!

westoncb 10y ago
> it's the web/Javascript ecosystem that's the problem. I agree—that's definitely the bigger issue. I think differences between editors and languages tend to be overblown in general. Unfortunately the project for me was not quite a fun thing: I ran into an issue with mouse/keyboard overuse, so I was trying to build an editor that could work efficiently with motion sensors. In the meantime, coding was painful :/ I'm still looking for an alternative for that reason—but VR and mobile also have needs for efficient editors that can be operated with fewer unique symbols. Also, another solution to the AST editor issue: just convert any non-parsing nodes into plain text nodes until they're fixed.