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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

I got an idea for a language where the code in the file format is some intermediary language, which you write with an editor plugin that makes it more human-readable.

The editor plugin (in contrast to existing language plugins) also translates the error msgs back to the human-readable code.

Just an idea, but I could not get it to fit in the questionaire :)

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Have you heard of Unison? If not, it may interest you -- it stores code in a syntax tree rather than as text directly.

https://www.unisonweb.org/

>Unison is a language in which programs are not text. That is, the source of truth for a program is not its textual representation as source code, but its structured representation as an abstract syntax tree.

It has some further goals for doing this which are really exciting to me, such as content-addressable code, but the starting point is similar to the one you stated. :)

Interesting. And friendly..

Interesting indeed! Thanks for pointing this out.

Projectional editors use that setup. Might be slightly different than what you have in mind since projectional editing is not great at text editing. But have a look at Jetbrains MPS, that's a language workbench for projectional editors.

Simonyi’s Intentional programming also.

How about Java Bytecode?

You can write it in Java, Scala, Kotlin, Clojure, Ceylon, Groovy and many more.

This reminds me of "programming ligatures": https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

In SmallTalk you had everything as part of a binary "image". The compiler/interpreter, debugger, IDE, the standard library, your source and everything else was in one big blob.

This sounds like assembler.

That's waaaay to low level for what I had in mind.

Congratulations, you just invented AppleScript!

i feel it's more like LISP (the AST is the language) or like Haskell's or Rust's intermediary languages.

LISP coupled with an IDE that let you plug in higher-level abstract editors that represented their state as valid LISP code could almost fit the bill.

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