crowdhailer

I have a few weird syntax I've worked on in the past so this is definitely possible. Currently only the textual representation and structural editor are in the repo. The most different I have done is a layout where the AST was presented like a file tree.

apply ├── int_negate └── 5

I believe this was a separation that existed in the role of programmer (logic cognition) from coder (details) in the early days of computing. I previously read a good post about this but can't find it now.

Bringing a sound and totally inferred type system, including of all effects. Is the main dimension. It also aims to improve the friction around managing dependencies.

Thank you. I have some new editor features I hope to share once the package management is improved.

I'm not sure "normies" is the right grouping. I think that is too broad some people are artists and some people just aren't that curious to try. I think a better group to target is "makers" I think that's anyone with enough ambition to at least try and fix a plug or change a lightbulb.

I think this is a point I should make more clearly. And there are more examples of programmable environments. Excel being one.

To me stuff slipping through the cracks is a feature not a bug

I'm enjoying the resurrection of all these concepts. I hear it explained as agents work best with feedback/constraints, my confusion is I believe people do as well so why were they not so popular before. Either way it's nice to see it happening and I'm very bullish on Gleam continuing to be a good choice.

But fair?

I think that friction of feedback and friction of construction are two different things. Having lots of tokens to build things doesn't mean you have more feedback. I'm a bun user I like it. I can't really comment from my use on what the Zig vs Rust rewrite means to me.

Not heard sunk cost fallacy described as a feature before. Interesting idea.

Writing my own programming language eyg.run that for a long time had no syntax. I worked on a structural editor for a long time and this weekend I finally documented the sneaky text syntax that did exist for testing. So the structural editor I'm not sure about the future. The language is still fun to write and use tho.

I think more people having a crack at a language is a good thing. It demystifies a lot. For a long while I wanted the install guide for EYG (my language) to be a tutorial to write an interpreter in the language of your choice. I thought following the guide should take about a weekend and cover every feature in the language. For production you might want someone else's implementation, but for getting started what a great intro.

I think this is going to turn into a very smart move by Zig.

This was good for me to read. I'm still on GitHub, but think about moving more frequently than I'd like to

I certainly know and admire eve. However I don't think I consciously took that many features from it into EYG. I'd be curios what the crossover is

Ahh yes so I am. thanks for the correction

I guess ASML chips are selling as well as they hoped, need a bigger customer.

I'm excited to see less object allocations as an improvement. Should really help when walking AST's

I'm pretty confident they will become a common feature in functional languages. Unison, Roc, EYG also have some version.

Then we just need to wait for the functional languages to become mainstream.

I wrote about them here. https://crowdhailer.me/2025-02-14/algebraic-effects-are-a-fu... as I got a reasonable handle on implementing them in EYG

All the examples are editable, though not as text.

I super enjoyed the last installation of this. I think I've watched every talk twice. I'd love a similar format for a selection of language design talks.

I'd love to try implementing this in some other languages.

Indeed. Here's a link to one episode https://pod.link/developer-voices/episode/e47720e8c6dc3d1660...

What requires the format to be text-like? I'm not sure I agree with this assertion. I think structural editors need to be language specific so that they can offer higher value edits that might only make sense for specific languages.

The EYG type system does support recovery, so you will get multiple type errors if that's the case in the program.

It could be in principle. EYG was developed along with the editor so that has effected the design of the AST. Ideally if a useful/powerful/pleasant/intuitive structured editing experience was found for EYG (and it's minimal AST) then it would be proven to work and so putting the effort into doing for a program with a more complex AST would be worth the effort.

I'd really like to get to the point where I have a library of transformations and you can make your own interface. Already the click ui and hot keys ui call the same `insert_function` or `assign_to` functions. Adding a ui with lots of dragging or voice control should be trivial

Diffing is really an interesting point. Git is quite (maybe very) good. I wonder how much better a structured approach could be but it's obviously a large amount of work that I don't yet have time for.

I'd love to get this to the point where add your own keybindings to structural edits, potentially very involved ones. It's superficially not very different to a combination of vim macros, auto completes or templates in other editors but I think the end result could be interesting as the units of change would be more meaningful. I think it's the same benefit of a hygienic macro system vs a source file manipulating version of meta programming.