edn VS todomvc

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...

The odd thing is unison started purely as a language. Now there's a platform.

I often find the best way to understand complex things is to dig all the way back to when they were being thought up. In this case there's a blog post from 2017 that I still find useful when thinking about Unison:

https://pchiusano.github.io/2017-01-20/why-not-haskell.html

Key quote:

Composability is destroyed at program boundaries, therefore extend these boundaries outward, until all the computational resources of civilization are joined in a single planetary-scale computer

(With the open sourcing of the language I doubt it will be one computer anymore, but it's an interesting window into the original idea)

Personally I find there's a lot to this. It's interesting that we're really, really good at composing code within a program. I can map, filter, loop and do whatever I want to nested data structures with complete type safety to my heart's content. My editor's autocompleting, docs are showing up on hover, it's easy to test, all's well.

But as soon as I want cron involved, and maybe a little state-- this is all wrecked. Also deployment gets more annoying as they talk about a lot.

So I think Unison always had to have a platform to support bringing this stuff into the language, even though they built the language first.

I'd love to hear some opinions from outside Unison about how they like using this language, tooling and hosting.

I'd like to hear this too.

Also, it would be great if there was something like https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/ or https://todomvc.com/ for platforms that we could use to compare Unison, AWS, etc etc. Or is there already a 7GUIs for platforms that I don't know about?

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc.git

The problem with this question is that, if it's not engineering, what is it? A better question is motivated by studying the history of chemistry and its progenitor, alchemy. That is: is software development alchemy or chemistry?

Software development alchemy. Just like alchemy, software dev is not standardized, everyone has their own idiosyncratic naming systems, classifications and rules-of-thumb. Like alchemists, software engineers are often jealous of their proprietary knowledge. Just like alchemists, they admired, feared and loathed for having secret knowledge. And just like alchemists, you have to be exceedingly brilliant to work in such a chaotic field and get anything done.

What changed alchemy into chemistry, and what is the analog to that in software? Arguably the change started with notion of conservation of mass and energy, and the development of the periodic table (thanks to Lavoisier and Mendeleev, respectively). As for what that analog is for software, first we need a characterization of the field. With alchemy and chemistry both, it's essentially mixing stuff together, heating and cooling it, and seeing what happens. But what is it for software?

Software engineering is often mistaken for computer science. Computer science is a tiny subset of software engineering. In practice, almost all of computer science is encapsulated in a few, tiny standard libraries - the places where bubble-sorts and hash maps live. (This mistake is consistent, and leads to "leet code" style interview questions which are irrelevant to actual work). I'd characterize software engineering as the set of solutions to a boundary value problem[0] described as "a set of interacting screens with behaviors pleasing to humans". The current solutions to this problem have been idiosyncratically shaped by resource constraints that rapidly relaxed over time[1], and characterized by elements discovered at random by necessity: e.g. kernels, processes, files, procedures, terminals, etc. In this analysis "language" functions as a kind of "coordinate system" as in physics[2][3], within which each of these elements are described, and within which elements are combined to make new elements, which eventually yield a solution to the boundary problem (which is termed "application").

I don't particularly know what the standardization of software engineering will look like, but I'm certain that this analysis, or something similar to it, is the first steps in the right direction. Personally, I look forward to the day we can shed the considerable weight of our alchemical origins.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_value_problem

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinate_system

3 - https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code - the same problem is solved in many languages. For applications: https://todomvc.com/

Compare the source code at https://todomvc.com/ to see what various frameworks bring to the table. VanillaJS is generally 2-3x as much code since you have to implement the MVC logic yourself.

There is an example (not mine) of AnjularJS controllers, how much JS I have to write:https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/architecture-examples/angularjs/js

Learn by doing. You could recreate the TodoMVC app.

How easy or hard to build Shopify without zero coding experience? Shopify is a big thing =) So that would be hard to build with zero coding experience. Start with a todo list, micro blog, or something small in scope that interests you. https://todomvc.com/ is interesting since it is the identical app, written in many different ways, different languages and frameworks - and you can use them as reference to see how others have built something.