A New Way of Blogging About Common Lisp (2018) | Hacker News Reader

A New Way of Blogging About Common Lisp (2018)

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22 pointssusam7 comments

These types of integrations are nice and very much appreciated as a way of demonstrating the liveness of the code. I have taught a few courses using these types of live evaluation plugins and the question students always have next is "How can I draw a line or modify the text in the browser itself?"

There are several live document editing solutions out there and a recent interesting one comes from Gilad Bracha's Newspeak [1] project. His latest live Document [2] demo is quite interesting as you can edit a live document with the web page. You can also execute Newspeak code and use the results to modify the document as well. His ideas are worth a look if this is sort of thing you find interesting.

[1] https://newspeaklanguage.org

[2] https://blog.bracha.org/WYWIWYG/out/WYWIWYG.html?snapshot=WY...

It bugs me that browsers don’t support a good interface for actively “operating” on web data i.e. a “meta” layer on top of the data. By and large, they restrict users into (only) consuming information, in an extremely passive mode.

What would it take to not just do operations on the client side (like JS), but also insert the locus of control to empower the user side with flexibility?

My guess is that it would take a really good understanding of what task the user is trying to accomplish. Working from that, you could then create the interfaces.

I frequently catch myself writing code more from the "I am able do this" rather than the "should I do this" point of view. In my experience, not having a clear goal that benefits a user makes it hard to get any idea adopted.

What do you think an empowered user would want to do? All the pieces are probably there to make things work.

I think what’s needed is a robust bunch of primitives that users can easily combine to do many things. As with any organic system, I would expect the availability of capabilities to spur creativity, the Emacs ecosystem being a great case in point.

But to try and give a more direct answer to your question: I often want to download/backup or otherwise programmatically process content that I routinely interact with online (this could be playlists, emails, messages, whatever). Another interesting example pertains to the “agents” available in “Huginn”: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

It would be nice if more such capabilities were integrated into the browser (or other common operating tools).

Exposing this sort of capability is very interesting, especially coupled with agents is indeed interesting. Getting this type of functionality added to the core browser seems like a long and complex standardization process. Perhaps a plugin would be one means of doing it?

The semantic web hasn't been adopted, so one challenge would be how to categorize and expose the content to any sort of API. Perhaps such a system already exists.

The emacs ecosystem is a good example, but as you stated, it really requires expertise to utilize. I know of commercial service like IFTTT [1] but the thought of having this type of service be a utility available to any browser user is more interesting to me.

[1] https://ifttt.com

Do you mean something like nyxt?

[1] https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

Yes, I’m really excited about Nyxt for exactly for this reason :-)

While I’m still a Common Lisp novice, I’ve been using Nyxt more these days, and it’s already helping me improve my workflows in several little ways!

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