Inspiring a future Clojure editor with forgotten Lisp UX - Shaun Lebron

ClojureTV
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2017–2019
YouTube
23K views · 9 years ago · talk · expert · dated

Shaun Lebron's ClojureTV talk on forgotten Lisp editing ideas that could inspire a future Clojure editor. He covers the history of structured and projectional editing in Lisp and the thinking behind Parinfer.

HN people cite it as the best summary of past attempts at structural Lisp editors, and as the source for Parinfer making parentheses automatic.

“Using a Lisp with Parinfer makes the parens automagic without taking away the benefits they provide.”
Tools for thought & programming UX
#lisp#clojure#parinfer#structuralediting#editorux

6 comments from Hacker News

t
@tosh2018 · in “Inspiring a Future Clojure Editor”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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k
@kasbah2017 · in “Inspiring a future Clojure editor with forgotten Lisp UX [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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t
@tosh2017 · in “Inspiring a future Clojure editor with forgotten Lisp UX”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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A
@AlexSolution2019 · in “Show HN: Bel”
Using a Lisp with Parinfer makes the parens automagic without taking away the benefits they provide. link ▶ this video
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c
@cellularmitosis2019 · in “Dreaming of a Parser Generator for Language Design”
That's a great suggestion. Which attempts are you familiar with? The ones I'm familiar with are summarized in this talk: ▶ this video
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A
@AriaMinaei2017 · in “An experimental software development environment”
This is called 'projectional editing', an idea that to my knowledge goes back to the 60s. A projectional editor shows you both the original source code, and alternate representations (or, 'projections') of it. Given the right plugins and config, these alternate projections could happen to be more intuitive to grasp/edit than the original source code. One plugin could, for example, remove all the unnecessary semicolons. Another, could remove all the unnecessary punctuations and project the code in an indentation-significant way or vice-versa. Your idea to replace all the `'bar' + foo`s with ``bar{foo}``s would also be possible. It's easy to imagine much more advanced use-cases. A sufficiently advanced editor could detect calls to FRP libraries, and project the data flow as a visual graph (picture all the `flatMaps()` and `scanLatest()s` as nodes on that graph). Or, given access to compile-time type info (via a typescript-style language-server), it could overlay the type of a value with the missing fields being shown as slots to be filled. I can imagine such an editor to mostly "obsolete" the idea of a single syntax for each language in the first place. Like the language but not the syntax? Roll your own syntax! Just configure your own editor plugins. No one would have to know. No one would have to agree with your "taste." Not even your git repo [0]. (See /r/nosyntax/ for more ideas) A projectional editor can also be implemented in the runtime, ala Smalltalk. In that case, the language itself is designed from the bottom up to accommodate such DX and opens many more possibilities. A Clojure Conj talk called "... forgotten Lisp UX" explores the history of this idea in the context of lisp [1]. The author is also on Patreon doing exciting things in this field (link). --- [0] the editor may store some metadata next to the code that'd be committed to the repo, but the code itself would still be saved in the original syntax. [1] Inspiring a future Clojure editor with forgotten Lisp UX - Shaun Lebron ▶ this video
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