Code typography is such a neglected area, I'm glad to see any projects that touch on that. This reminds me of Suns Fortress language, which was designed also for scientific computing (afaik more in HPC sense), and also allowed rendering code into pdf with improved typography. Unfortunately lot of the original Fortress resources have linkrotted away, but there are some examples in this presentation (by Guy Steele!) https://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/150FP/archive/neal-glew/mcrt/F...
Agreed, I've wondered why it's so ignored since I first learnt to program, and relatedly, why are programming languages strictly English-based?
Those slides are my introduction to Fortress. Sounds nice, sorry to hear it's discontinued. I'm struck by how very similar to Julia it is (which is officially inspired by Fortress), for example the focus on performance and maths, zero-cost abstractions, type specialisation, very similar syntax, ASCII<->Unicode equivalence, encouragement of unicode identifiers and operators, and some (small) amount of eliding '*' for multiplication. (You can write "2(a + 1)a^2" but not "(a+1)(a+2)" because the latter is a function call. Whitespace between multiplicands not allowed.)
It seems it would be easy to write a package to display Julia code as HTML or Latex, although I didn't find one. There's already a library to print expressions as Latex, and of course in a Jupyter notebook results are displayed in HTML.
This is super cool! Recently, I've been musing about the potential ergonomics of programming directly with rich typography, and here Forscape's kind of gone and done it.
The project seems to be specifically targeting working scientists, but I think there's real potential for using mathematical and math-like notation in a general programming language. The array language family does adopt a few of the affordances from math, and even that partial pick-up gives them some ergonomic features not seen elsewhere.
At the moment, we're kind of stuck in the paradigm of linear input, only using very limited typography for somewhat dumb syntax highlighting. Math-like notation is really nice at conveying semantics and intent in ways that are really challenging in current languages. For example, sub- and superscripts effectively act as function parameters but give extra freedom for conveying the different meaning and use of said parameters. Things like Haskell's generic infix syntax, named parameters, optional arguments, etc. can be seen as ways of trying to work around current limitations.
The biggest question for me is input, which Forscape seems to address quite nicely. We don't just want to typeset our code prettily, we want to have all the affordances of advanced typography directly available as we code.
I'd love to hear user stories from Forscape: Do you like the mouse-oriented editor experience or do you prefer keyboard shortcuts? What is easiest for you to express in Forscape the language? What is most challenging? Where does the system diverge most from the natural expression? For those with a programming or CS background, how easy is it to reason about memory access and execution? Etc.
Mathematica also has some fairly advanced typographic syntax. Matrices, subscripts, integral signs, with a decent input system to match. Type <ESC>dint<ESC> to get a definite integral with placeholders.
One particularly nice thing about it is that it's completely optional sugar over a lispy "FullForm" syntax, and it's easy to convert between the two.
I'd encourage everyone to play with it, but it's sadly non-free.
LyX is great, and if only LyX could a) generate code from math, b) run that code and also any other embedded code, c) produce and embed graphs and other illustrations from the results of running that code, then LyX would be perfect.
If you asking this, you are the wrong audience. All academic journals accept submissions in Microsoft Word, this is a similar tool targeted at the WYSIWYG crowd.
Reminds me of https://github.com/mtarek/compitex which is a very barebones LaTeX math to C compiler. I've done a bit of work to make it better, but it really needs a lot of work, and it needs to compile to languages with polymorphism.
TFA makes me really like the idea of literate papers, with math, code, and data embedded in the paper.
It makes the code significantly easier to read but equally harder to write. In my opinion, mathematical formulas, while elegant and precise, aren't always designed with machine computation in mind. You often have to compromise on their beauty or precision to achieve reasonable time complexity, and sometimes it's necessary to make a mess to get there. But kudos to them for their work and effort.
I may be missing the point, but I'm not sure there is really an audience for this...obviously nice math typography is important for publishing, but I doubt the set of people who are comfortable with advanced math but who see translating those operations into a traditional plain-text programming language as a barrier, but would be fine with a more math-like syntax, is very large.
It's almost certainly not a large set of people. It's probably no larger than the set of professors and grad students who could use it. But it does seem very useful to those people. Incidentally, that's basically the same people that TeX was meant for originally.
Why a new language ? Honest question ? Couldn't it be done on top of say, Julia ? The typography thing is really cool, but having to code in yet another MatLab-clone is a bit annoying (or maybe I'm missing the point)
If you have a very complex equation then it will be a lot easier to read it and think about it if it's typeset correctly than if it's written in monospaced ASCII in Julia/Python/Java/C++/Rust/Haskell/Whatever.
So then you have two options:
- compile the typeset equation to code
- hand-code the equation
Forscape is a third option, perhaps more akin to a Jupyter-style notebook, where you write equations and text but you can "run" those equations. Literate programming isn't quite this, not unless you automatically get codegen from your equations.
zokier|1 year ago
versteegen|1 year ago
Those slides are my introduction to Fortress. Sounds nice, sorry to hear it's discontinued. I'm struck by how very similar to Julia it is (which is officially inspired by Fortress), for example the focus on performance and maths, zero-cost abstractions, type specialisation, very similar syntax, ASCII<->Unicode equivalence, encouragement of unicode identifiers and operators, and some (small) amount of eliding '*' for multiplication. (You can write "2(a + 1)a^2" but not "(a+1)(a+2)" because the latter is a function call. Whitespace between multiplicands not allowed.)
It seems it would be easy to write a package to display Julia code as HTML or Latex, although I didn't find one. There's already a library to print expressions as Latex, and of course in a Jupyter notebook results are displayed in HTML.
WillAdams|1 year ago
http://literateprogramming.com/
I use it in a current project using LaTeX:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
xelxebar|1 year ago
The project seems to be specifically targeting working scientists, but I think there's real potential for using mathematical and math-like notation in a general programming language. The array language family does adopt a few of the affordances from math, and even that partial pick-up gives them some ergonomic features not seen elsewhere.
At the moment, we're kind of stuck in the paradigm of linear input, only using very limited typography for somewhat dumb syntax highlighting. Math-like notation is really nice at conveying semantics and intent in ways that are really challenging in current languages. For example, sub- and superscripts effectively act as function parameters but give extra freedom for conveying the different meaning and use of said parameters. Things like Haskell's generic infix syntax, named parameters, optional arguments, etc. can be seen as ways of trying to work around current limitations.
The biggest question for me is input, which Forscape seems to address quite nicely. We don't just want to typeset our code prettily, we want to have all the affordances of advanced typography directly available as we code.
I'd love to hear user stories from Forscape: Do you like the mouse-oriented editor experience or do you prefer keyboard shortcuts? What is easiest for you to express in Forscape the language? What is most challenging? Where does the system diverge most from the natural expression? For those with a programming or CS background, how easy is it to reason about memory access and execution? Etc.
Thanks for sharing!
cobbal|1 year ago
One particularly nice thing about it is that it's completely optional sugar over a lispy "FullForm" syntax, and it's easy to convert between the two.
I'd encourage everyone to play with it, but it's sadly non-free.
auggierose|1 year ago
WillAdams|1 year ago
cryptonector|1 year ago
Basically we need to marry LyX and Jupyter.
Onavo|1 year ago
cryptonector|1 year ago
TFA makes me really like the idea of literate papers, with math, code, and data embedded in the paper.
sdqri|1 year ago
etbebl|1 year ago
cryptonector|1 year ago
Kye|1 year ago
wiz21c|1 year ago
cryptonector|1 year ago
So then you have two options:
Forscape is a third option, perhaps more akin to a Jupyter-style notebook, where you write equations and text but you can "run" those equations. Literate programming isn't quite this, not unless you automatically get codegen from your equations.