Intentional Programming demo (Part 2) - Compiler
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as an early demo of projectional, AST-based programming whenever editors, code views or non-text programming come up.
What it is
Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2007 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites amichail · 2007-02 · on “I'm looking for a partner or two (here are some of my ideas, feel free to add your own here)”
I am interested in seeing what happens when you apply intentional programming to web [this video] idea is to open up your search engine so that anyone can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains. Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.
Cites amichail · 2007-03 · on “SF Chronicle article about new search startups”
I wonder if it would make sense to make a search engine platform where (more technical) users can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains. Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service. This is sort of like intentional programming, but applied to [this video]
Cites corysama · 2016-11 · on “Ask HN: Is the architecture of programming tools historical accident?”
It's a shame the Intentional Software crew have been nearly silent for the a decade or so they've been in business. They've been doing projections-of-ASTs based programming for a very long time. They bragged a lot about it early on and I haven't heard much of anything since. Here are a couple of demo vids from well over 10 years ago: [LINK] [this video] Here's an interview from 2009 where one of the crew members talks about an annotated S-expression as the core code representation (IIRC, it's been a long time since I listened to it) [LINK]
Cites sweetsocks21 · 2024-02 · on “Clean your codebase with basic information theory”
Intentional Software was working on a system like this many years ago: [LINK] Part 2: [this video] You can project your programs into different views and add lots of metadata about the program and use that data in various contexts. Also extends to source control and other use cases. It looked really neat. I'm not sure what happened to it.