3 ms·

not really sure what you mean by 2D/3D. if you mean "whitespace sensitive" (≈ effectively laid out in 2D), what about YAML? pretty sure you could just add dashe

by uryga 6y ago

not really sure what you mean by 2D/3D. if you mean "whitespace sensitive" (≈ effectively laid out in 2D), what about YAML? pretty sure you could just add dashes and get valid YAML representing the same tree: - A - B - C - A to put it bluntly, i'm really not seeing what's so groundbreaking about using indentation to represent nesting – it's a nice concise syntax, but it's just that. if there's cool things you can do using that syntax (AIUI, Tree Languages and tools built around them, which reminds me of racket-lang and their whole "language-oriented programming" idea), that might be interesting; but failing that, people will dismiss your claims of being revolutionary as crankery, which will hurt your project's image.

breck 6y ago
> not really sure what you mean by 2D/3D. Turn off the computer and "write" a program by assembling legos. One token is one lego block. So an open quotation mark—"—is one lego block. If you can align all the lego blocks in a single line, and the meaning of the program does not change, you have a 1-D programming language. This is the case for all the languages you mentioned—"JSON/YAML/XML/s-exprs". This is not the case for Tree Notation/2-D and 3-D languages. Changing the 2-D positioning of the tokens changes the meaning. Now you might say that this is not the case because you could just have a lego block that equals "\n", and so the parsing would be the same. But the mistake their is to miss the general idea of 2-D languages. While Tree Notation first parses a program linearly from start to end, that's just because it's a limitation based on how our current computers are designed to work, and having multiple read/execute heads starting and moving in different directions across a memory cube is not technology we currently have. I gave a talk on this putting it another way a few years ago: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldVtDlbOUMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldVtDlbOUMA". To put it another way: you don't need syntax characters, all you need is space. > but failing that, people will dismiss your claims of being revolutionary as crankery, which will hurt your project's image. I figured it would take ~10 years of hard work and dedication to chisel out the core of this idea and make it "just work" for people. I'm about 4 years in, so the bulk of the work and resources to put in are still ahead. I do not want to put so much effort and resources into a novel idea that wouldn't have much of an impact if it turns out to be correct. I give this idea a low probability of being groundbreaking (<10%), but if it is it will fundamentally change our languages and probably make a significant impact across society in many unpredictable ways (probably many orders small than binary notation, but many magnitudes bigger than most things). So I'm happy to sacrifice my "image" for this idea. I want people to be critical, especially now, still in the early days, to figure out the flaws here. I'm still not seeing one. From all the data I've seen so far, these types of languages will be a 10x+ leap in technology. It's a really big idea.

by uryga 6y ago

breck 6y ago

> not really sure what you mean by 2D/3D. Turn off the computer and "write" a program by assembling legos. One token is one lego block. So an open quotation mark—"—is one lego block. If you can align all the lego blocks in a single line, and the meaning of the program does not change, you have a 1-D programming language. This is the case for all the languages you mentioned—"JSON/YAML/XML/s-exprs". This is not the case for Tree Notation/2-D and 3-D languages. Changing the 2-D positioning of the tokens changes the meaning. Now you might say that this is not the case because you could just have a lego block that equals "\n", and so the parsing would be the same. But the mistake their is to miss the general idea of 2-D languages. While Tree Notation first parses a program linearly from start to end, that's just because it's a limitation based on how our current computers are designed to work, and having multiple read/execute heads starting and moving in different directions across a memory cube is not technology we currently have. I gave a talk on this putting it another way a few years ago: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldVtDlbOUMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldVtDlbOUMA". To put it another way: you don't need syntax characters, all you need is space. > but failing that, people will dismiss your claims of being revolutionary as crankery, which will hurt your project's image. I figured it would take ~10 years of hard work and dedication to chisel out the core of this idea and make it "just work" for people. I'm about 4 years in, so the bulk of the work and resources to put in are still ahead. I do not want to put so much effort and resources into a novel idea that wouldn't have much of an impact if it turns out to be correct. I give this idea a low probability of being groundbreaking (<10%), but if it is it will fundamentally change our languages and probably make a significant impact across society in many unpredictable ways (probably many orders small than binary notation, but many magnitudes bigger than most things). So I'm happy to sacrifice my "image" for this idea. I want people to be critical, especially now, still in the early days, to figure out the flaws here. I'm still not seeing one. From all the data I've seen so far, these types of languages will be a 10x+ leap in technology. It's a really big idea.