runningskull

I discovered Red (and its predecessor Rebol) a few months ago and was really excited about it - very interesting blend of ideas that seems to hit a sweet spot for GUI scripting. Then I discovered it doesn’t have 64-bit support and it seems the community is debating about whether it even should, as it would require a significant overhaul. This makes it a no-go at least for Mac users unfortunately.

Anyone know how likely this is to change [soon]?

You’re right about Neovim’s effect on Vim improvements and lighting a fire in Bram.

Even if neovim goes belly-up (unlikely), or totally diverges (slightly less unlikely), they’ve done a huge service to the vim community simply by existing and offering compelling, thoughtful enhancements while respecting the core spirit of vim - and being exceptionally mindful of practicality in how they approach changes.

Probably one of the best-ever examples of a fork that is Doing It Right.

I’m torn by the idea of replacing vimscript with lua. I honestly enjoy both languages (vimscript is not as bad as its reputation!) but they each shine in different use-cases. Lua is more ergonomic for writing programs/plugins, but vimscript is more ergonomic for interactive use (and maybe config files, more below).

For non-vimmers, a good analogy is the shell: would you want to replace sh with a more robust language like lua? Few people seem to enjoy writing larger programs in sh, and are quick to jump to perl/python/ruby once a script crosses some complexity threshold. However, I doubt many people would want to give up sh for interactive use. Mainly[0] due to omitting “cruft” like parens/quotes/commas, and also pipe syntax. Minimal example:

    ls -laht | grep foo

is nicer than

    grep(ls(‘laht’), ‘foo’)

especially when you’re doing thousands of commands of varying complexity every day.

Vimscript is similar, again mainly due to omitting “cruft” like parens/quotes/commas, and also some specific sugar. Minimal examples:

    iabbr cosnt const

is nicer than

    iabbr(‘cosnt’, ‘const’) 

and

    s/foo/bar/g

is nicer than

    sub(‘foo’, ‘bar’, ‘g’)

especially when you’re doing hundreds (thousands?) of commands of varying complexity every day.

Besides setting options, the vast majority of the “meat” of my config file boils down to these types of commands, and is thus much more readable with the cruft omitted, even though I only have to type it once.

This could probably be addressed with some light syntax sugar on top of lua, and I think I remember seeing some comments from the Neovim folks about this very thing, but I’m not able to find anything concrete at the moment. Does anyone know where this stands?

—

[0] Of course, another issue (for both shell-scripting and vim) is the huge amount of tools built on top of the existing language, which we may be remiss to abandon. For shells, it’s probably practically impossible. For vim, I suspect it is possible, though it would be painful enough to merit a long hard think.

Silly as this product is, as a kid I always wished for something like this to up the immersiveness of video games. Maybe it would be doubly effective now with VR.

Getting it in a reasonable form factor and some practical issues (stinking up the house) seem like roadblocks, but I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this come back around, focused on gaming.

Rafflecopter | Sr. UI Engineer (Clojurescript) | Boulder or Remote

Looking for someone with a deep knowledge of ClojureScript - and the browser environment in general - who can help build and evolve (and open source) our internal reagent-powered UI toolkit. Should be able to blur the line between frontend/backend development - care about getting small UI details right and not be afraid of diving into to server-side Clojure when the need arises. Bonus points for experience w/ a variety of past/present UI toolsets & techniques.

We're a small, smart team/company run by developers & we care a _lot_ about UI development. You'll be hard-pressed to find a team more dedicated to making a great product, or an environment more amicable to this kind of work.

Email me (ceo, product/ui lead) directly: [email protected]

Comment of the day :)

As a designer I would never hand over my designs to one of those chop shops. Any designer worth his salt can code his own designs. I don't trust the psd2html services to give me high-quality, semantic, robust markup and CSS.

Marked "read later". ;)

An admittedly cursory comparison shows that Hoptoad isn't free. That could be reason enough right there.

(edit: beat to it!)

"The good life" means different things to different people.