[Haskell-cafe] Block editor for Haskell

[Alfred Matthews]

This is substantially interesting to me personally, persuant a paste below,
as a spectator of PLD.

Pretty keen to read the, Hey, but, wait,

Alfred Matthews.


Better Collaboration
One of the most difficult things about collaborative development is
handling merge conflicts.

The vast majority of merge conflicts are results of non-functional changes:
Renames, reformatting, textual movement of code lines between files, etc.

In Lamdu, "names", the "position" of the code and other non-functional
aspects of code are separate from the code itself, and avoid conflicts.

Rename conflicts
To get a conflict due to "rename" operations, two developers must rename
the same variable to two different names. Even then, the code is still
executable, but its on-screen rendering will display a localized conflict.

Formatting conflicts
Formatting is automatic, so there is no way to generate a conflict.

Code movement conflicts
The "position" of code is meta-data attached to the code, helping to find
that code and position its rendering.

Since code is not structured into text files, code "position" conflicts are
similarly less harmful, less likely and localized.

Change tracking
Instead of heuristically guessing what changed in the code, as traditional
version control systems do, Lamdu uses an integrated revision control
system and records the changes by the programmer as revisions.

This acts as a record of the developer's intent, allowing the RCS to
distinguish, for example, between function deletion and writing of a
similar function, and the modification of that same function. The recording
of intent helps prevent and resolve conflicts.

Regression Debugging
Integrated revision control and live test cases will allow "Regression
Debugging".

When a change causes a regression, the root of the problem can be found
quickly, by finding the deepest function application whose result value
diverged from the correct version of the code.

Automatic Formatting and Sugaring
Lamdu attempts to take away as much inconsequential freedom from the
developer, to free his mind and his key strokes to deal with the parts that
matter in the code. Thus, Lamdu does not provide means to edit formatting
on a case-by-case basis. Generalized changes to layout rules can be
provided, instead.

Additionally, to avoid further stylistic dilemmas, Lamdu uses automatic
sugaring of code, as the dual of typical "de-sugaring" done by textual
languages.

The code is edited and displayed in its sugared form. The edits to this
form are translated to lower-level, simpler edits of the stored language,
which is de-sugared. Lamdu uses "co-macros" that capture patterns in the
lower-level code and automatically sugar it to canonical form. This frees
the programmer from worrying about whether to use sugar for each particular
case.
On Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 5:16 AM Alan & Kim Zimmerman <alan.zimm at gmail.com>
wrote:

> See lambdu.org
>
> On 26 April 2018 at 10:47, Alex McLean <alex at slab.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm wondering if anyone has made a 'block editor' for Haskell, i.e. a
>> syntax-aware text editor where you make a program by snapping together
>> type-compatible words, usually with a mouse. Something similar to
>> Scratch for example: https://scratch.mit.edu/
>>
>> Any leads appreciated!
>>
>> Best wishes
>>
>> alex
>>
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