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One great resource for making a language without a parser, not just delaying it but never writing it at all, is JetBrains' MPS[0]. It lets you make languages in

One great resource for making a language without a parser, not just delaying it but never writing it at all, is JetBrains' MPS[0]. It lets you make languages in a projectional editor: rather than a syntax parsed into an AST, you edit the AST directly in a series of GUI cells pretending to be an editor, much as in MS Word, so rather than writing a parser from syntax to AST, you write a renderer from AST to syntax. Benefits of this approach include there being no such thing as a syntax ambiguity, language extensions being as easy to make as libraries, the language being easy to write by non-programmers, and a JetBrains IDE for your language - at the cost of not being able to use any other editor. A great example of such a language is mbeddr[1]. [0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ [1]: http://mbeddr.com/ http://mbeddr.com/

mathisfun123 3y ago
Just last week I went through the calculator tutorial and I gotta say nah this ain't it. I had hope even though I knew what the deal with projectional was going in and indeed I was disappointed. The number of proprietary "dsl"s you have to grok to be proficient at using MPS is just mind-boggling and that's coming from someone that designs dsls for a living. Like by the time you get to codegen you're already 3 or 4 deep. And it's only for codegen, where you're generating Java, that you get the full projectional editor treatment. Everything else is just a gui form for some small "dsl" with effectively dropdowns, so you might as well just call it an API for a configuration system rather than a language. Like there's zero composition for the structure "language" and the editor "language". You're literally just toggling forms. It's just a complete turn-off because even if it is "powerful" it's completely non-portable - you cannot ship anything without shipping MPS to orchestrate the cascade of dsls. I tried to get mbeddr to work but could not even though I can drive gradle and etc fine. Overall really disappointing.
- oaiey 3y ago
  Both comments are right. Projectional Editors are the thing to avoid parsers (instead of parsing you spend time in the editor though). And MPS is indeed a beast.

mathisfun123 3y ago

Just last week I went through the calculator tutorial and I gotta say nah this ain't it. I had hope even though I knew what the deal with projectional was going in and indeed I was disappointed. The number of proprietary "dsl"s you have to grok to be proficient at using MPS is just mind-boggling and that's coming from someone that designs dsls for a living. Like by the time you get to codegen you're already 3 or 4 deep. And it's only for codegen, where you're generating Java, that you get the full projectional editor treatment. Everything else is just a gui form for some small "dsl" with effectively dropdowns, so you might as well just call it an API for a configuration system rather than a language. Like there's zero composition for the structure "language" and the editor "language". You're literally just toggling forms. It's just a complete turn-off because even if it is "powerful" it's completely non-portable - you cannot ship anything without shipping MPS to orchestrate the cascade of dsls. I tried to get mbeddr to work but could not even though I can drive gradle and etc fine. Overall really disappointing.

oaiey 3y ago
Both comments are right. Projectional Editors are the thing to avoid parsers (instead of parsing you spend time in the editor though). And MPS is indeed a beast.