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Indeed, it's close. Obviously mine and Breck's levels of appreciation for indentation/brackets are very different. ;) Although independent, the paths we have ta
by djedr 4y ago
Indeed, it's close. Obviously mine and Breck's levels of appreciation for indentation/brackets are very different. ;) Although independent, the paths we have taken to arrive at these are somewhat similar (somewhere early in there are experiments with visual programming). As are the tools of thought (minimalism). We were thus taken to similar places.
Before I was aware of the existence of Tree Notation I put my syntax online at tree-annotation.org (now defunct), so even naming converged. I was initially very confused myself. :D
Ultimately I think that the existence of multiple incarnations of this idea suggests that there is (perhaps a very niche) need for a minimal syntax like this. Something like S-exps, but general-purpose. Trying to satisfy that need is the common cause.
The way I imagine it is that it would be supported across programming languages, like JSON. It could be an universal format for (tree) structured data. There is this piece of the Unix philosophy which says that text streams are the universal interface. That's true on a certain level. On another level not far below binary streams are the universal interface. On another level not far above... there was nothing universal until XML. But that was overkill, so JSON displaced it. But that's still overkill, so...
- abathur 4y agoI agree that it feels like multiple projects are converging on something that is ripe (or close). I have done some deep-digging for markup languages and came across more than one project in this space. (I've added Jevko to my list; https://twitter.com/abathur/status/1582492437984837632 https://twitter.com/abathur/status/1582492437984837632) You may have already seen it as well, but you might also find https://github.com/teamtreesurf/link https://github.com/teamtreesurf/link interesting.
- djedr 4y agoNice list! I haven't seen any of these before. Link Text is particularly ~~spooky~~ interesting to me, as it quotes Tao Te Ching. :O See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33251715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33251715 Maybe it should become recommended reading for minimalist syntax designers. :D The spirit that lives in the computer must be the same one as the one in the Chinese classics. The universal interface below text streams was also somewhat inspired by one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number#Leibniz_and_the_I_Ching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number#Leibniz_and_the_... Pretty fun to think about.