BABLR: an unreleased project

[conartist6]

https://github.com/bablr-lang/

On particular axes it is:

• Intended for programmers
• Runs natively in a web browser (it's written in JS)
• Will be donation-driven
• Will eventually support ALL programming languages
• Will eventually support voice programming through Cursorless

[conartist6]

Oh it's also headless, so it will be able to support many UI experiences built on top.

[agentofuser]

This looks very exciting! Anywhere I can read more about the VM/language design for performing operations on the code-DOM?

Still trying to figure out basic things (like what's the difference between bablr-vm and agast-vm), but from naive first look at evaluate.jss it seems kind of concatenative?

I've done research on modeling/designing UI as a Turing-complete concatenative action language and seeing "VM" in the context of edit operations struck a chord. Would also love to have a chat if you're interested.

[conartist6]

Yes, it's all based on stream processing -- in other words the computations are time-ordered not space-ordered.

The distinction is that agAST is a language-agnostic format akin to XML. It has some very basic rules about document structure, and agast-vm ensures that those very basic rules cannot be broken.

BABLR is the language-aware layer (like ANTLR), and you can think of it more like XML schema validation. Within it the rules of the specified language cannot be broken.

[conartist6]

The insight was that HTML works the same way: it doesn't tell you exactly what data structure to use to store your DOM in (which is crucial for interoperability), but instead it defines trees by their traversal: HTML is basically a sequence of instructions for how to traverse a specific tree, which is a sufficiently powerful representation to do query engine execution, deserialization, equality checking, and streaming transformation.

[conartist6]

The most basic of the bablr-vm invariants is that printSource(parse(someLanguage, sourceText)) === sourceText, and just knowing that to be true is a big win for being able to build a language-agnostic semantic editor. Notice that printSource does not even care what language the document is in.