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I find it baffling that Lisp is still written in text. It's pure AST, so it's easy visualize and manipulate it as a tree. Small trees (definitions of functions

I find it baffling that Lisp is still written in text. It's pure AST, so it's easy visualize and manipulate it as a tree. Small trees (definitions of functions and data structures) are composed into big tree that forms application. Why not do all development work (reading/writing) on this tree directly? In my view the Lisp should be first candidate for visual programming. Agreed, re-frame and its tooling is awesome. BTW is there any way to drop into REPL from context of event handler?

Retra 7y ago
I don't understand your surprise. Text has many compatibility, readability, and uniformity advantages. How are you going to diff a tree? How are you going to make the display consistent across platforms & tools? How are you going to represent the details of the program? In the end, you're still just projecting abstract objects onto a 2d plane, and text already does that in a maximally flexible way. Anything else is less.
darkpuma 7y ago
Isn't the most popular Lisp editor, emacs, AST aware? I'm a filthy vim using pleb but I'm under the impression that emacs is aware of s-expression encoded ASTs and has all sorts of 'chords' for manipulating the AST.
kazinator 7y ago
A program's abstract syntax tree in memory is still a form of text; it's just chopped up (not a linear tape of symbols), and some of the representations are altered. For instance the number 5 becomes 101 or perhaps 10101 (01 type tag) or whatever. Bits are still text: reams of text made of two symbols. The so-called visual programming languages do not get away from text. They show various boxes or blocks on the screen, but the contents of those blocks are pieces of text. Every single screenshot of a visual programming language shown in this article is nothing but snippets of text inside boxes. If we take a Lisp expression like (a a a) and show it as three boxes, each labeled with a, that is not an accurate tree representation. The actual tree is a DAG, in which there are three pointers leading to a single symbol whose name is a. If we show three boxes, then we do not have anything close to a purely visual AST language. We have a language of textual tokens which require passing through a reader so that multiple occurrences of the text a get turned into the same object.

Retra 7y ago

I don't understand your surprise. Text has many compatibility, readability, and uniformity advantages. How are you going to diff a tree? How are you going to make the display consistent across platforms & tools? How are you going to represent the details of the program? In the end, you're still just projecting abstract objects onto a 2d plane, and text already does that in a maximally flexible way. Anything else is less.

darkpuma 7y ago

Isn't the most popular Lisp editor, emacs, AST aware? I'm a filthy vim using pleb but I'm under the impression that emacs is aware of s-expression encoded ASTs and has all sorts of 'chords' for manipulating the AST.

kazinator 7y ago

A program's abstract syntax tree in memory is still a form of text; it's just chopped up (not a linear tape of symbols), and some of the representations are altered. For instance the number 5 becomes 101 or perhaps 10101 (01 type tag) or whatever. Bits are still text: reams of text made of two symbols. The so-called visual programming languages do not get away from text. They show various boxes or blocks on the screen, but the contents of those blocks are pieces of text. Every single screenshot of a visual programming language shown in this article is nothing but snippets of text inside boxes. If we take a Lisp expression like (a a a) and show it as three boxes, each labeled with a, that is not an accurate tree representation. The actual tree is a DAG, in which there are three pointers leading to a single symbol whose name is a. If we show three boxes, then we do not have anything close to a purely visual AST language. We have a language of textual tokens which require passing through a reader so that multiple occurrences of the text a get turned into the same object.