A different approach for all delimiters ]})

[shaunlebron]

Thanks for making this experiment. Had a new idea to run by you:

• Opening delimiters required.
• Closing delimiters at the end of each line not allowed.
• Closing delimiters inferred before the first line whose x falls behind its own.
• Closing delimiters required for strings since whitespace is significant there.

(defn component
  "a hiccup style component.
  second line of docstring."
  [image-source
  (html
    [:div
     (if image-source
       [:img {:src image-source
              :on-click #(swap! app-state
                           update-in [:counter] inc
       [:span "no image"
     (for [[i msg] (map-indexed vector messages
       [:div {:style {:background (lookup-color i
        msg

This would allows us to remove most ]}) delimiters, not just ):

Not sure how practical it would be for writing, but I think it reads okay.

[boxed]

I actually did try this, but I found it to be less readable.

[darwin]

Interesting ideas. I've been hacking on Plastic Editor for ClojureScript for past couple weeks. It is not in good shape yet. But I would like to experiment with inferred parenthesis at some point. I would like to experiment with use of full retina pixel resolution and power of CSS to somehow display this structural information, while editor would not force you to do delimiter baby-sitting.

I'm open for (crazy) ideas :)

[shaunlebron]

@boxed cool you thought of it too, did you notice its relation to Haskell's $ operator?

putStrLn (show (1 + 1)) -> putStrLn $ show $ 1 + 1

I think there's an applicable idea in here somewhere, maybe for better editing like in @darwin's editor. I'll keep thinking about it.

[boxed]

@darwin I think there are some things that will give you a huge bang for the buck compared to my inferred paren thing. First is: any ( on the first column of a line means that's a new form. Meaning you can close anything before, or create an error message there. This is hugely useful. Much much better than missing a ) and ending up with an error message at the end of the file.

Another thing is to just check that the indent matches the structure of the code. I've found this to be difficult because people (including Rich) format their code... let's say "creatively", and Clojure contains way too little information to be able to know if (foo x y z) means "call foo with x and then y and z are a pair" or "call foo, x and y is a pair and z is something else" or any of the other variants which you need to know to validate the indents :( I've done some work on this at https://github.com/boxed/clojure-validate-indent

[darwin]

@boxed my editor will be structural only, so that the user cannot run into unbalanced parens. My comment was more related to the display of the inherent structural information which is normally encoded as parens and the intent is communicated to the reader with line-breaks and indentation. I'm interested in new ways how display/communicate this information. Inferred parens is an approach which replaces some explicit parens with conventions (e.g. some of those map to line-break/indentation rules). Which I believe is promising and can lower cognitive load for a trained eye.

But I would like to go beyond text representation. I have zillions of pixels at my disposal. I would like to map that information to some clever graphical representation. Maybe even in 3d.

[darwin]

FYI, this is my two months old brain dump:
https://gist.github.com/darwin/d8fc8556e6fbdc7dee11

Note that some technical stuff is not relevant anymore, I have switched to Atom and wrote a replacement for rewrite-cljs from scratch.

[boxed]

Ah. Yea I agree that going beyond text mode is probably a good idea if you're going to go full on structural editor anyway.

[shaunlebron]

@boxed @darwin thanks for all your thoughts on this. enjoyed reading your brain dump as well. I've started some further work on this inferred paren idea here: https://github.com/shaunlebron/parinfer I hope to have a working demo soon

[shaunlebron]

working demo and explanations: http://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/

[darwin]

Awesome work. I'm 100% sure this is going to be #1 on HackerNews tomorrow :) Congratulations Shaun!

[boxed]

Cool!