Albert Zak

Run, Build, and Grow
Small Systems
Without Leaving Your Text Editor

Presenting at LIVE @ SPLASH 2024

Watch on YouTube (15 min) >

Clojure, but more alive

See the value of any expression on any node – in your code.

A REPL, but it's connected to all your nodes at the same time (1:n)

• Query macro expression
  • rewrites itself to show the data inline
• Declarative deployment
  • Say "this function should run on that node"
• Supervision & reconciliation
  • Stop a process? Comment it out.
• Effects via object capabilities
  • All host platform caps passed in as argument
• The editor is also a node
  • You can run code in it
• Define and use custom inline editor visualizations
• Values have history

Taglines#

• "Grug-brained Erlang"
• "Debug mode is the only mode"
• "A personal Bank Python" [todo / future work]
• "(i) see inside (ii) see across time (iii) [see across possibilities]"
• Baby's First Situated System
• Worse is Better [?]
• If Raspberry Pi were as simple as Arduino / P.C.C

Status#

Hacked together with SCI, rewrite-clj, zprint, Lezer and CodeMirror. Everything barely holds together.

I am ashamed of the code. But I might clean it up and release it if enough people are interested.

Maybe even turn it into a real useful thing?

Related work#

• Smalltalk
• Lisp
  • Emacs
    • org-mode
• TaskTXT - via Potluck - roundtrip state through plain text
• APX - trace points + context
• Cap'n Proto - IDs in code to stabilize expressions
• music live coding environments
  • ixi lang - self-rewriting code
  • Motifn - bidirectional viz, keyboard actions
  • Gibber - inline viz
  • Strudel - viz+sliders
• Eve - viz, feature flags, programming for humans
• Dark classic - redeploy-on-every-keystroke, production traces in the editor
• preimp, aka: The Program is the Database is the Interface - self-rewriting Clojure notebook

More related work that's missing from the video#

• Glisp - bidirectional self-rewriting Clojure-ish code, custom editor UIs for types
• Quokka.js, Console Ninja - inline runtime values, inline logging
• DreamBerd - question marks! 🐸

Future work (todo)#

• error handling - at least like Sentry, maybe even a poor Smalltalk debugger or Common Lisp condition system
• persistence story - accretive bitemporal facts like XTDB or something local-first?
• communication - infer netcode like Electric
• codebase management - hashed like Unison or Scrapscript
• collaboration / ocap code sharing / delegate authority to change part of the system
• control over when and where changes deploy: staged rollout, feature flags, "under construction" development preview areas
• actually secure security
• release as extensions for common editors (maybe as language server?)