Alternate Syntaxes v Old Fashioned Approaches

Aug 26, 2024

We have adopted old-fashioned notations for writing running programs.

The notations we use were influenced by media like clay tablets, quills and papyrus, Gutenberg presses.

Are computers just better forms of these same kinds of media, or, are computers a new kind of medium?

Alternate Syntaxes

On the belief that current programming languages are but assemblers for even higher-level languages1, I’ve been fooling around with text-to-text transpilation (I call it t2t) and Diagrammatic Programming Languages (DPLs, Drawware, 0D).

The point of these experiments is to build different engines for doing things like

Creating DSLs that include Unicode symbols, then converting the DSLs to running programs using assembly languages like Python
Converting Kinopio JSON to markdown text, using assemblers like Prolog, Javascript, Odin, etc.
Using draw.io to draw diagrams of programs and to compile the diagrams into running programs using assemblers like Python, Odin, etc..
Saving diagrams out to XML (“graphML”) then transpiling to Python.

References

OhmJS:

https://ohmjs.org/

t2t: [WIP] https://github.com/guitarvydas/t2t and https://github.com/guitarvydas/build-t2t

0D: [WIP] https://github.com/guitarvydas/0D

draw.io:

https://app.diagrams.net/

PEG: https://bford.info/pub/lang/peg/

Kinopio2md: [WIP] https://github.com/guitarvydas/kinopio2md

Blog:

https://guitarvydas.github.io/

Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingsimplicity2980