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Comment by soegaard | Hacker News Reader

Penrose is a platform that enables people to create beautiful diagrams just by typing notation in plain text.

https://penrose.cs.cmu.edu/

Well, tried modifying Caffeine (since it looks like there should be a perfectly 3-symmetric variant repeating the O and CH3 arms, but it ain't "beautiful". Wonder how their Caffeine molecule comes out so perfect. Here is the code for my wonder molecule:

   -- Wonder molecule, expressed via structural-formula DSL
   Carbon C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6
   Nitrogen N1, N2, N3
   Oxygen O1, O2, O3
   Hydrogen H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, H7, H8, H9

   SingleBond(H1, C1)
   SingleBond(H2, C1)
   SingleBond(H3, C1)
   SingleBond(N1, C1)

   SingleBond(H4, C2)
   SingleBond(H5, C2)
   SingleBond(H6, C2)
   SingleBond(N2, C2)

   SingleBond(H7, C3)
   SingleBond(H8, C3)
   SingleBond(H9, C3)
   SingleBond(N3, C3)

   DoubleBond(O1, C4)
   DoubleBond(O2, C5)
   DoubleBond(O3, C6)

   SingleBond(N1, C4)
   SingleBond(N1, C5)

   SingleBond(N2, C5)
   SingleBond(N2, C6)

   SingleBond(N3, C6)
   SingleBond(N3, C4)

   AutoLabel All

   Title title
   Label title "C6H9N3O3"

> just by typing notation in plain text

Isn't this what all computer programming is?

You might be surprised how many people would exclude languages like HTML on the basis that they don't describe computations. (I am more of a PL maximalist: any syntax that allows you to describe and manipulate some class of semantic objects in a machine-processable manner can reasonably be called a programming language.)

To me, the statement "just ... plain text" implies some level of simplicity that I don't see in the examples. It looks pretty complicated, in fact. There is no escaping essential complexity.

I took the like from the frontpage. Maybe they want to attract non programmers and doesn't want to scare them with the word "programming"?

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