(ninth RacketCon): Andrew Blinn – Fructure: A Structured Editing Engine in Racket
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a leading example of structural editing whenever threads discuss alternatives to text-based code editors.
What it is
A RacketCon talk presenting Fructure, a prototype extensible structured editing engine in Racket. Language providers define syntactic forms and refactorings as rewrite rules, and editing operates on program structure rather than on text.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2019 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends disposedtrolley · 2020-08 · on “MicroBlocks: Scratch and Smalltalk-inspired MCU VM for live embedded programming”
I've seen a few attempts at "structure editors" which are keyboard driven but limit what you can type so it's always syntactically correct. Fructure is an example which looked promising! [this video]
Recommends loosetypes · 2020-08 · on “Hazel: A live functional programming environment featuring typed holes”
For folks interested in this sort of thing, Andrew Blinn gave a neat talk[1] pertaining to structured editing at Racketcon, which credits Cyrus’ work with Hazel. [1] [this video]
Cites disconcision · 2019-10 · on “How can we develop transformative tools for thought?”
I'm currently working on a structured editor which is at its core a customizable rewriting engine; you specify a grammar, and essentially all editor actions are rewrites on that grammar. My current target grammars are for simple LISPy languages because of the simplicity, but my original (and eventual) goal was/is as a tool for exploratory mathematics. I've always felt mathematical manipulation as more of tactile, synesthetic phenomena than a verbal/linguistic one; I feel like the current state of haptic input is not quite up to reifying this yet, though it is improving very rapidly these days! So I'm trying to tackle some of the software side, and seeing what can be done towards this goal wi
Cites TuringTest · 2019-10 · on “How can we develop transformative tools for thought?”
> I still think excel is the leader in this category. Yes, definitely. The "reactive functional" programming paradigm of the spreadsheet is radically more understandable for end users than the imperative, as it doesn't require keeping a mental model of state changes in memory. Fortunately, React has popularized this reactive functional paradigm and it is no longer confined to spreadsheets. > I’m thinking the same elements presented in an environment perhaps more like Scratch could work An approach of visual building blocks could help for learning, though Scratch is imperative so it has all the trappings that make a language hard to learn for non-programmers, plus all the inconveniences of ed
Cites threatofrain · 2019-12 · on “Lisp Programming in Vim with Slimv or Vlime”
In my mind the main reason why Vim still has relevance today is for seat-of-your-pants SSH'ing, which admittedly shouldn't be done but it still is. Outside of that... I still have hope for structural editing but I don't see Vim as the innovator in that space anymore. [this video]
Cites spaethnl · 2020-04 · on “Simula: A VR window manager for Linux”
I'm not sure I agree with the parent, but to give an example for a non-rectangular UI for manipulating (programming) text: Combine structural editing[1] overlaid on some kind of 3d graph that shows how your entire codebase fits together. [1] [this video]
Cites disconcision · 2021-08 · on “Snap is Scheme disguised as Scratch [pdf]”
using a lisp here simplifies things from implementation and interaction model perspectives. you already have a simple, canonical AST out of the box, which in-principle suffices to support the entire language, not just a toy version. so it makes sense lisps are attractive targets for getting something rolling in this space, though it's certainly debatable whether it's long-term the best choice. (my own efforts in this space (a structured editor in racket), which i was able to get going as a novice programmer: [this video] )