Run, Build, and Grow
Small Systems
Without Leaving Your Text Editor

Presenting at LIVE 2024

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ehR-KIgw7T8

Clojure, but more alive.

• A REPL, but it's connected to all your nodes at the same time (1:n)
• See the value of any expression on any node – in your code
• Query macro expression rewrites itself to show the data inline
• Declarative deployment: "this function should run on that node"
• Supervision & reconciliation: Stop a process? Comment it out
• Effects via object capabilities: all host platform caps passed in as argument
• The editor is also a node and you can run code in it
• Define and use custom inline editor visualizations
• Values have history

Taglines#

• "Grug-brained Erlang"
• "Debug mode is the only mode"
• "A personal Bank Python" [future work]
• "(i) see inside (ii) see across time (iii) [see across possibilities]" – Seeing Spaces
• Situated [Systems]()

Status#

Hacked together with SCI, rewrite-clj, zprint, Lezer and CodeMirror. Everything barely holds together.

I am ashamed of the code. But I might clean it up and release it if enough people are interested.

Maybe even turn it into a real useful thing?

Join the wait list & get notified when it's alive >

Related work#

• Smalltalk
• Lisp
  • Emacs
    • org-mode
• TaskTXT - via Potluck - roundtrip state through plain text
• APX - trace points + context
• Cap'n Proto - IDs in code
• music live coding environments
  • ixi lang - self-rewriting code
  • Motifn - bidirectional viz, keyboard actions
  • Gibber - inline viz
  • Strudel - viz+sliders
• Eve - rules db, programming for humans
• Dark classic - production traces in the editor
• preimp - self-rewriting Clojure notebook

Missing from the video:

• Glisp - bidirectional self-rewriting Clojure-ish code, custom editor UIs for types
• Quokka.js, Console Ninja - inline runtime values, logging
• DreamBerd - question marks

Future work / todo#

• error handling - at least like Sentry, maybe even a poor Smalltalk debugger or Common Lisp condition system
• persistence story - accretive bitemporal facts like XTDB or something local-first?
• communication - infer netcode like Electric
• codebase management - hashed like Unison or Scrapscript
• collaboration / ocap code sharing / delegate authority to change part of the system
• control over when and where changes deploy: staged rollout, feature flags, "under construction" development preview areas
• actually secure security
• release as extensions for common editors (maybe as language server?)

Comments welcome: hi@albertzak.com 💌