Post AMpJ6VAVxmhzGi271s by ae@pleroma.envs.net
 (DIR) More posts by ae@pleroma.envs.net
 (DIR) Post #AMnYKrGjhYPsrVKL44 by binarycat@pleroma.envs.net
       2022-08-22T21:14:33.469288Z
       
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       why do we insist on expressing code as text?  it does make sense in a lot of cases, but noone seems to be willing to step outside the bounds of textual source code.even smalltalk, for all its novelty, never took the final step.  methods still have a concept of textual source code.this is even more confusing for lisps imo.  you have a universal datastructure, but you insist on marshaling it into text first, to the frustration of many developers.seriously, image never getting another "mismatched parenthesis" error ever again.  we could have this.  it's not a hard problem.
       
 (DIR) Post #AMo2iDzSO5gucGIqES by probablyat@freespeechextremist.com
       2022-08-23T02:54:58.184842Z
       
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       @binarycat because everything is a stream of bytes and there is no simpler method to present a stream of bytes than in the form of plain text.
       
 (DIR) Post #AMpJ6VAVxmhzGi271s by ae@pleroma.envs.net
       2022-08-23T00:41:08.371097Z
       
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       @binarycat I think there's a very simple reason: as they say, "text is the universal format." Language specific formats would mean you depend on a particular editor (or at least a small set of editors), and it'd be hard to share your program through any medium not built with your language in mind. Which is most of them.
       
 (DIR) Post #AMpJ6VWUe4I0MsJfHs by binarycat@pleroma.envs.net
       2022-08-23T17:33:19.848936Z
       
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       @ae you can still marshal the source code to text for transfer if you want.things like smalltalk get the worst of both, you are still editing text but it gets saved in a monolithic binary image.there have been languages that only work with a few editors, however most of them are still fundamentally text editors (i mentioned smalltalk before, colorforth is another that comes to mind)
       
 (DIR) Post #AMpJclZ8XCljOEw14q by binarycat@pleroma.envs.net
       2022-08-23T17:39:09.112531Z
       
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       @samgai i'm imagining something like scratch except it operates on S-expressions.this would even give the opportunity for things like localization, allowing one piece of code to be viewed in multiple languages.i'm also imagining something like inferno, so you would be able to send objects across devices, and the system would be a complete development environment.
       
 (DIR) Post #AMpKrlesZXzPyWL0pE by binarycat@pleroma.envs.net
       2022-08-23T17:53:03.682608Z
       
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       @samgaiyou can still type the code without it being represented as plaintext.  one thing that actually does this somewhat is the "inspect element" feature of most browsers.as for version control, plenty of filesystems have ways of creating incremental backups of linked data.  it's not hard to imagine finding some way of implementing branches on top of that.
       
 (DIR) Post #AMpLeDC1VDpdGvwNuK by binarycat@pleroma.envs.net
       2022-08-23T18:01:49.450798Z
       
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       @samgai plenty of systems have already taken that leap.anyway, i think i've emphasized binary vs. text too much.  imagine instead if i said like, an emacs mode that make a strong guarantee that it will never produce invalid S-expressions for any sequence of inputs (besides like, disabling the mode ofc).