Wow, author here, was not expecting this to end up here! This project is very much in development, it's not close to a finished product and I hope I didn't give that impression. I created the site so there'd be a space other than my blog to share updates about progress and so on. If everything I wrote sounds like nonsense, check back in 6 months. I am hoping things will be much further along, and more concrete by then. It will get there.
I definitely appreciate the feedback from folks about how it is unclear what the project even is from the descriptions. I am still trying to figure out the best way to explain it succinctly (so far haven't been too successful). Having a better demo to show would definitely go a long way.
This might help a little bit - here's a video and some explanation of the expression editor from my blog: http://pchiusano.github.io/2015-03-17/unison-update5.html The platform is going to be more than just the editor, but that might provide a feel for what the editing experience could be like. Obviously many details and polish to be worked out.
Ok, so I spent about an hour casually reading the posts, watching the demo videos and glancing at the code. I agree with your premise and I like a lot of the implementation so far. It's great to see more innovation and research in this area alongside Light Table, Eve (which seems to be going in a similar direction with spreadsheets), NoFlo and others.
I'm curious about the goals of the project. If the goal is to replace an existing language and editor pairing then it's going to be an uphill battle (see previously mentioned related projects). If it's to be supplemental with existing development tools then what use cases are you targeting?
Adding this as an optional layer to an existing editor might help work out some of the ergonomics. Performance issues aside, building on top of Atom might be a good choice since it's mostly web based like the current UI in the demos. Similarly, a custom kernel or cell type in ipython might get the ideas into daily use.
I think the time is ripe for this kind of software: I'm also working on something very similar. I've put a lot more work into the editing/layout features than the portion for generating the AST—but my scheme for doing it is nearly identical to what you have in your video. A demo video of my editor is here: http://symbolflux.com/projects/tiledtext
When I was working on it before my approach was to use grammatical knowledge of traditional, text-based languages to generate a selection of grammatically valid constructs for your current 'cursor' position; only in the last few weeks did I hit on the idea to do it 'syntax-free' (in my terminology).
My thinking on why 'syntax-free' is The Way to go: if you look at what someone's trying to do when writing a program, it's really: (1) select language construct (2) select parameters as a 'configuration' of selected construct. Text is one way to specify those things, but a far more effective system addresses the fact that that's all you're doing directly, and allows views to be attached after the fact (even if something that's primarily text ends up being the optimal view!).
In case it's helpful to you for communicating the idea to people, I often described the benefit of this kind of system to people as automatically allowing someone who only knows how to read a language, to also be able to write in it—no more remembering the details of how to express construct X in language Y.
The things you're describing are EERILY similar to some stuff I've been conceptualizing and thinking about recently, as inspired by the VPRI people's work/OMeta/Shen. I'd just remark that...
"The program is a UI, and UI interaction is programming. Unison panels take the idea of spreadsheets, which blur the distinction between UI interaction and programming, to its logical conclusion."
...this blurring between programming and interaction (which I've also thought of) probably offers a potentially viable path to much more powerful voice control of devices, since programming APIs serving as user interfaces can now also (besides graphical UI) implicitly define strict grammars for structured voice input. That's the one thing I thought of that I didn't see mentioned there.
One term I didn't see on the page, but you should look into examples of if you already haven't, is "structure editor". That's the notion of a source code editor which doesn't allow free-form text editing, but creation of well-formed language semantics.
As someone with a "similar" platform, I too am rather surprised this end up on HN frontpage ;(
Few questions:
* how is your editor different from MPS (except being browser based)?
* how does your project compares to an implementation on top of language workbenches?
* do you think your assumption about time spent on a project is mostly Haskell related or is that for some specific types of projects?
* are you thinking about implementing some framework of your own or do you have some other in mind?
* do you plan on integrating with existing libraries or write your own implementation?
And comments:
* for me good IDE feels like semantic editor. I'm inclined to believe that text based editor can have all the good features of semantic editor and avoid most of the bad ones.
* while writing simple structures one time and reusing them vertically in a project is useful, it's doubtful that it's worth while. It becomes worth while only if you have project in multiple languages/technologies. But mostly if you can do refactoring automatically (even database schema migrations).
* try to explain your project better, this should help you with narrowing it's scope. Most of the people will try to fit it into some category they are familiar with so emphasize the distinctions.
Can I summarize this with: immutable lisp with 2-way bindings to m-expressions? Sorry I don't mean to trivialize or anything, but me and my friends have been thinking of something eerily on these lines. I think it's one of those ideas whose time has come. After reading your descriptions I think I have a better idea in my mind of what I was grasping at earlier. We were pretty inspired by Elm and you seem to be too.
This is extremely relevant to my interests and something I was pondering beginning work on. It makes me very glad (if not feeling a bit unoriginal) to hear that so many other people had plans to do similar. :)
I definitely appreciate the feedback from folks about how it is unclear what the project even is from the descriptions. I am still trying to figure out the best way to explain it succinctly (so far haven't been too successful). Having a better demo to show would definitely go a long way.
This might help a little bit - here's a video and some explanation of the expression editor from my blog: http://pchiusano.github.io/2015-03-17/unison-update5.html The platform is going to be more than just the editor, but that might provide a feel for what the editing experience could be like. Obviously many details and polish to be worked out.