This Statement Is False

While working on Leisure , I searched for tools to traverse text in DOM trees, but most of the ones I found were fairly limited.  One nice one is Rangy ( https://github.com/timdown/rangy ), which has a TextRange that can traverse by characters and words with rules for skipping over invisible text, collapsing contiguous whitespace, etc. Leisure, however is what you might call an “ultra-rich text” environment and needs more power.   This isn't my announcement of Leisure, by the way -- it's got a bit farther to go for that -- so consider this a teaser :). Leisure documents are orgmode files and the environment has a couple ways to present them, some of which sprinkle controls and views in among the editable text. During the design, I decided to use the contenteditable attribute and use the text in among the sprinkled controls and views as the actual document text, as opposed to emulating document editing, like code mirror does . Over the years, I experimented with different ...

We had our first Coding Dojo session, today.  I wanted to start a "Programming Dojo" and I found that some people had already been doing that for years , so I decided to use their wisdom :).   Here's a great video, linked from the same site. The guy making this gestures with the camera a lot.  If you get easily motion-sick, maybe you should just listen to it. The idea is to have 2 people pair programming in front of a group, with the group kibitzing.  Techniques are discussed only in the context of code and programming is the path to learning in the coding dojo.  I'm introducing people, here, to functional programming concepts.  Here is the "kata" we used, today: Kata: Person Learning about "selector functions" 1. Write a "person" function, person(name, address, gender):  it returns a "person"; something which can be used to retrieve the values you man not create a new array, object, or string you may use comparis...

So far, the only untyped, lazy language I've found that's being maintained is Lazy Racket .  I've been interested in Lambda Calculus for a while, though, and LISP/Scheme aren't quite what I want (and they're quite a bit larger, too), so I decided to extend the Lambda Calculator  into a standalone language.   Here's the repository .  The goal is to make it native, but for now, it's still in JavaScript, although it will run "standalone" in node.js (and also in browsers).  Here are the language features I'm interested in: lazy , so no side effects, because they can really mess up a lazy language untyped ; Haskell is already there for typed, lazy languages metaprogramming ; the eval function uses ASTs that are LC functions We'll rewrite Lazp's parser and code generators in Lazp, so it's self-hosting I "hand assembled" the AST functions, so they're in Lazp, already This means metaprogramming in Lazp can happen at pa...

I added an intro, a summary, and a few more ideas to the Code Google post .  It needs a better name that doesn't just mean "search" to people and also doesn't include trademarked words :).

UPDATE: Added structure and a few more ideas... Intro Have you ever seen someone include a giant open source library in a project, just to access some small part of its functionality? It's very important to have someone else write, debug, and maintain a large part of your code, but when you do this over and over, it can add quite a lot of bloat to an app for comparatively little gain in functionality. This is a huge problem, as I see it, but maybe there is a solution? What about allowing people to integrate only small subsets of modules into their code. I'm calling this idea "code google," for lack of a better term, although it's a LOT more than just search. It involves search, analysis, IDE integration, and social networking, so that library developers can track what parts of their code are actually being used. It's far from trivial to implement, but I think it could be very useful Before our company started, a friend and I wrote a fair-sized ga...

I already blabbed this in a bunch of emails to people, but just in case... Scott Dunphy of New Style interviewed me about Death of the Vele, here . This was the first time I've been interviewed for anything; I was surprised I sounded coherent -- I thought it might come out a lot less cohesive than it did when I listened to it.

I have changed TPS many times in the past year and a half, but the core idea is still to be a collaborative story telling RPG that feels like a traditional RPG. The latest version of it is called Death of the Vele and the (lame) website is here It has a link to the latest rules. Wow, taking a look at the old rules, I see that I have streamlined the mechanics a LOT since last year. They are simpler, lighter weight, and more intuitive. There are also tools to promote more integrated and structured stories (spotlights, hitting aspects, etc.). Death of the Vele also adds a back story (which you can remove if you don't like, of course). I'm hoping to publish Death of the Vele within the next 12 months. In the mean time, the rules are out there for free, so anyone who wants to can use them. Here is the feature list from the latest copy of the rules: Collaborative, but feels like a traditional RPG Your characters are yours Supports campaign-length stories Game play ...