some-mthfka

You are absolutely on point, yes. The building blocks themselves are what the users will extend upon and use. That plays a very big role in composition and reuse. There will also be configurations and contexts (which are really quite simple mechanisms, really) that will factor into this, too (for the purposes of customization so that the users don't have to modify the original code to change some behavior or slot). Of course, prototype OO itself has a key agency here.

I also like to think about this in terms of "building blocks", not just an exposition of API. So, Emacs has the notion of a buffer for its building block (the only one, I believe). Cells and lenses will be building blocks.

Hey, thanks, I have recognized your nick, nyxt is a cool project : )

I am not sure I understand the question, but, for instance, Lem is an emacs-inspired CL editor. Not structural or even hierarchical though.

Update: I have updated the power-of-structure article with a section on accessibility.

Copypasting:

It's important to think about issues such as accessibility in advance.

I am basing my knowledge about this issue on this article about Emacspeak.

So, Rune will ask lenses to implement the surface-level text commands. Whatever text is shown or assumed to be on screen, the user will be able to copy that text programmatically. So, you could ask a spec-conformant lens stuff like "get the surface level text of the semantic unit at point". Such functions are of general utility.

Next, Runic functions will be required to return some information about the results of their semantic actions. So, if you issue a delete-semantic-unit command, it will return what it has removed (and that would include the info about the surface level text as well as the data-structural unit itself).

The list of such functions and their return-value properties will all be a part of the spec. So, it will be possible to automatically advice all these spec functions for any given lens to invoke the speech functionality.

Thanks for mentioning Sourcehut, somehow is just didn't come up when I was researching the mailing list options. So far, looks like it has a really streamlined interface and is meant to be integrated with the mailing list workflow, which I didn't quite see on Savannah.

Huh, interesting. I should try to learn more about STEPS in general some time...

My point isn't so much to reinvent Git's model (aka tree of blobs/commit/commit-graph), but rather to make it a part of a programmable interactive environment, and then just do the right thing from the user perspective.

That would include:

(1) Develop a UI for navigating the model,

(2) Develop a set of commands that act on the objects of that model.

I do want to append to the Git model by introducing the staging step for the whole tree (this, unlike with commits, won't have to have a history). I also think it could be possible to make it more flexible. So, you could say that there are blobs. But instead of blobs you could have some other kind of object too: for example the kind that would lazily compute itself from the definition of some other similar object. Or the kind of of object that would have knowledge about its contents, have an efficient way of storing it, maybe. So, I don't really want blobs (binary large objects), but rather a general kind of objects. Such objects would obviously need to conform to some API spec. Such objects could be written by the user (although, then he would have to supply the definitions to the others who want to use this). A tree could hold different kinds of such objects.

There's definititely some design that will have to go into commands. The commands would have to be taught to be context-sensitive (e.g. to selections or to the current state of the graph or commit).

A session-time undo graph for the repo-staging tree could be built as well. Easy implementation: copy the whole damn thing to memory on every change (only works for small repos, but that's a start). Harder implementation: define the inverses for the commands and build an undo graph.

I will admit: I am by no means an expert on version control systems. So, thanks for expressing the fact I didn't write about this, there's definitely some challenge to this, and I don't have any sort of final design in my head quite yet.

The thing about power-user software is that you can customize and package it to the point where it's indistinguishable from any other software, a polished end-user experience -- the user accepts the workflow of the given configuration and rolls with it, without ever touching the config. That's how some people use Emacs -- they just learn the bindings of the default distribution. But, for Emacs, there are also some distributions like Doom Emacs and such. They are just different user-friendly distros.

What's more, if you have good GUI capabilities (which Mage will have), you could build visual user interfaces for configuration (I don't plan to make such UIs btw, but someone with a good-enough UI sense and interest in this stuff could attempt it at some point, I guess).

If all you do is stick to some distro with some visual config tool, then you won't even have to know it's common lisp (unless some error is signalled and the interactive debugger pops up).

Oh, boy, how did I miss that one... heh.

You have a point there, I have thrown in a TLDR.

Good question. (Incidentally, it provides a good example for my words in the comment you have replied to.)

Words could be objects. But I will tell you more: you can start breaking words into characters and making them objects too, if you needed to. The key to performance here is to do the necessary stuff on the fly, on demand, dynamically. In other words, the word may become an object only when it needs to become a seperate entity. Suppose you use some data structure for storing sentences or paragraphs. Let's assume it's just a list. So, before a word needs to become an object that stores some information about itself, it can just be a string:

    '("This" " " "is" " " "a" "sentence" ".")

Now, if you wanted to tag the word "This" with some info (like stylization), you could turn that word into a more complex object:

    '(("This" :style bold) " " "is" " " "a" "sentence" ".")

In fact, if your application requires such an optimization, you could even store it as a simple string

    "This is a sentence."

You can choose whatever storage unit you like, as long as you can make your editor work with it. Structural approach allows specialization on the fly, you can just adapt to the granularity when you need it, since there's just full programmatic access.

Absolutely, it's image-based. I have considered Smalltalk, but I like macros a bit too much. I am pretty sure CL code will have better performance too, but don't quote me on this. A point worth making: if I were to do it in Smalltalk, I would choose the standardized one, as the most stable one. Stability is pretty important for a project like this, as you would imagine.

> Javas class and object system

I can't stress enough how important and helpful prototype OO has been to the current design. I couldn't imagine doing what I want to do without it. For example, some of the concepts such as configurations and contexts rely on dynamic inheritence.

> There may be insights there that can be mined as to possibly decisions that were made that you could apply (or not) to your work. Are the limitations of JFX done by design? Limited by Java? Limited by performance? Limited by "haven't got to it yet"? I don't know, but, anyway, just something you may want to study a little.

Sure, I will take a look. Thanks!