Meet Dark
Feb 27, 2020 · Chop-Chop Lunch&LearnTalk duration: 20 minutes of live coding + 10 minutes of YouTube
I did a lunch&learn on Dark today at my office, because I was desperate to share. I live-coded for about 20 minutes and we watched Ellen’s demo. Folks at Chop-Chop agree that Dark is freakin awesome.
So many brilliant ideas. My favorite is probably the structured editor.
Code in Dark is written in the Dark editor. The structured editor doesn’t allow you to make syntax errors. In fact, Dark doesn’t even have a parser. As you type, we manipulate the AST directly, similar to Paredit, Sketch-n-Sketch, Tofu, Prune, Lamdu, and MPS.
Every state of incomplete code in Dark has a valid execution semantics, similar to typed holes in Hazel. For example, as you change a function call, we maintain the memory of the old function until the new one is valid.
Since every program in Dark has meaning, incomplete code doesn’t prevent complete code from working.