Well we talked about it briefly on today's Rhombus call, and the possibility of a non-parenthetical tree-based syntax is on the menu for next meeting, and I made a Wraith PR as well: https://github.com/racket/rhombus-prototype/discussions/180#discussioncomment-1828786
Thanks to the Racket folks for tolerating me jumping into the meeting at last minute and raising my concerns, and expressing support for conversation on this in the next meeting.
@cwebber Thank you also for mentioning Wisp there. I’m trying to hold off from writing more, because I’m not really deep enough in racket for that. I hope the input I could provide will be useful.
If there’s something I can help with, feel free to ping me!
@ArneBab the more time passes, the more I admire Wisp!
@cwebber I’m so happy to hear¹ that :-)
¹: well, read :-)
Wisp has become my main programming language for anything except of work or lager existing projects — which is in part possible because it is just Scheme: There is nothing to change to take advantage of advances in Scheme.
@ArneBab The main thing Wisp and Wraith both are missing is tooling.
But what if Wisp/Wraith could learn from Fructure? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnbVCNIh1NA
What if Wisp/Wraith did something akin to rainbow-delimeters-mode, but instead lightly highlighted the background colors, drawing "shapes" around the boundaries of expressions?
@cwebber That would be pretty awesome.
@cwebber @ArneBab I had an idea of a "closer-to-text version of Scratch" that would basically present a text editor, but with colored boxes around expressions. I guess great minds think alike!
My idea also involved a palette of forms (again, a Scratch concept). It's meant to help transitioning from block-based to textual programming.
But then again, things with working implementations beat paper ideas anytime!