Inspiring a future Clojure editor with forgotten Lisp UX - Shaun Lebron
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as a summary of known attempts at structural and Lisp editors.
What it is
Shaun Lebron surveys 50 years of Lisp editing history and forgotten innovations in structural editing. He argues future Clojure editors could learn from them, and covers ideas like Parinfer.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2017 to 2019.
What Hacker News said
Cites AriaMinaei · 2017-10 · on “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
Cites cellularmitosis · 2019-03 · on “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]
Cites AlexSolution · 2019-10 · on “Show HN: Bel”
Using a Lisp with Parinfer makes the parens automagic without taking away the benefits they provide. [LINK] [this video]