wondered if i could punt a Hoplon design question to the group

I want to build a tree editor

the user can be editing any leaf of the tree, say building more of the tree

i’m wondering what the best way to approach this is

lets say the user inserts a branch, should i update the entire model and re-render the entire tree?

you're lucky there's pretty much a zipper-based tree editor done by Micha and Alan: https://bitbucket.org/alandipert/thelarch/

thanks will give a read

are you thinking of an AST editor?

like your reading my mind

any prior art you know of?

well, you can look at Eclipse sources

although that will just be confusing

thinking more hoplon based

are you looking for UX ideas?

or implementation?

implementation

know exactly what i want to build

I think the thing I pasted is closest to what you want already done in Hoplon

cool, dont want to re-invent any wheels

do you see users composing bigger scripts with that editor or just a single formula?

well functions

any expression really

and how big is an expression...

are you thinking performance?

no

idea is that can attach metadata to macros to give hints to layout

eg cond… pair per row

so type if space

and box appears for test then else

http://blog.interfacevision.com/assets/img/posts/example_visual_language_blockly_01.png

looks good

what i’m thinking would render like a standard langauge

this is a lot of stuff: http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarmming-languages-snapshots/

nice

at the end of the day, as programmers we’re building ASTs

question is whats the best way of doing that

answer may change per experience level of user

I've decided that allowing to just write code is most productive in my case

my users may not be programmers

its important to give as much guidance as possible for me

something that may help fill out the struture of the code would be helpful i think

well will be fun exercise if nothing else

is your language clojure/lisp?

yes

doesn't really matter though

as your situation is different

if you had such a renderer avaliable open/source would you be tempted to use it?

I wouldn't

I have a couple of specific cases which allow to "program" visually

e.g. select +/-/* and input number

but anything more complicated - you just program

i've been really excited about, but have yet to work on, a touch-based editor for a concatenative lang

there's a scheme editor for iphone, but i find trees don't really work with touch

and i have gforth on my phone, but the keyboard is cumbersome... so i imagine an editor with a "word bank" that's like an autocomplete, and you drag words into the program area to append them

we made this thing awhile ago and gave up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__ERGJ5EzAc

anyway, definitely excited to see any progress in any direction on lisp editors that anyone makes

using Hoplon as the implementation library, I wouldnt object to a critique of the design

ah, "parenthescope"

those were the days