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I'm currently working on a structured editor which is at its core a customizable rewriting engine; you specify a grammar, and essentially all editor actions are

I'm currently working on a structured editor which is at its core a customizable rewriting engine; you specify a grammar, and essentially all editor actions are rewrites on that grammar. My current target grammars are for simple LISPy languages because of the simplicity, but my original (and eventual) goal was/is as a tool for exploratory mathematics. I've always felt mathematical manipulation as more of tactile, synesthetic phenomena than a verbal/linguistic one; I feel like the current state of haptic input is not quite up to reifying this yet, though it is improving very rapidly these days! So I'm trying to tackle some of the software side, and seeing what can be done towards this goal with extant input devices. What I've done is pretty rudimentary so far, but I have a talk about it here if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA

westoncb 7y ago
I watched Andrew's talk recently, and I highly recommend it to other readers interested in the above topic. It's full of clearly expressed, interesting ideas. When I read: > What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. The Latex rendering was easy, but figuring out what "core tree manipulation ux actions" are is another thing. —in the parent comment, it was the first thing that came to mind.
mncharity 7y ago
Style checking that enforces a single representation for a given ast, seems now a thing in javascript land. One less worry for often-novice programmers. Which makes code files simply an ast storage format. And makes people's text editors and language modes into an representational ast editors. So... it seems industrial use of semantic editing has finally begun? Relieved of the impedance mismatch between code-as-ast and code-as-richly-expressive-text, perhaps there's an opportunity here to quicken the innovation and deployment of non-traditional editing? At a time when XR seems likely to be creating the next "great software rewrite".

westoncb 7y ago

I watched Andrew's talk recently, and I highly recommend it to other readers interested in the above topic. It's full of clearly expressed, interesting ideas. When I read: > What I want is a semi-tangible expression tree that I can manipulate and "snapshot" (to show my work) into Latex. The Latex rendering was easy, but figuring out what "core tree manipulation ux actions" are is another thing. —in the parent comment, it was the first thing that came to mind.

mncharity 7y ago

Style checking that enforces a single representation for a given ast, seems now a thing in javascript land. One less worry for often-novice programmers. Which makes code files simply an ast storage format. And makes people's text editors and language modes into an representational ast editors. So... it seems industrial use of semantic editing has finally begun? Relieved of the impedance mismatch between code-as-ast and code-as-richly-expressive-text, perhaps there's an opportunity here to quicken the innovation and deployment of non-traditional editing? At a time when XR seems likely to be creating the next "great software rewrite".