from Hacker News

Igneous Linearizer: semi-structured source code

by seagreen on 6/25/24, 3:44 PM with 40 comments

• by JonChesterfield on 6/25/24, 9:12 PM

  This is an interesting direction.

  One thought is that obsidian can execute web assembly and a parser / sema checker written in something that turns into wasm can therefore be run on the source files. Can probably tie that to a syntax highlighter style thing for in-ide feedback.

  The other is that markdown is a tempting format for literate programming. I do have some notes in obsidian that are fed to cmark to product html. With some conventions, splitting a literate program into executable code embedded in a html document is probably doable as an XML pipeline.

  In a much simpler vein, I'm experimenting with machine configuration from within obsidian. The local DNS server sets itself up using a markdown file so editing an IP or adding a new machine can be done by changing that markdown.

  I hope the author continues down this path and writes more about the experience.

• by arnsholt on 6/25/24, 8:27 PM

  This is neat, but it does seem like a lot of work to get part of the way to what a Smalltalk already gives you.

• by zacgarby on 6/25/24, 7:53 PM

  this is great! i’ve been thinking about exactly this (though styled after Logseq rather than Obsidian) but not gotten as far as implementing anything.

  that being said, the thing i haven’t been able to convince myself of yet is why these are different to just normal (in-line) functions? as in, why should i have to write [[foo]]: would it not be better to have all identifiers automatically linked?

• by binary132 on 6/28/24, 3:07 AM

  I really appreciate the unordinary direction you went with these articles and your site in general. An enjoyable read!

• by nbbaier on 6/25/24, 11:08 PM

  > The solution I've been waiting for is source-code-in-the-database. I'm cheering on multiple projects attempting this.

  What are the projects you're especially bullish on?