(2020-05-29) Pereira Whats Next

Jared Pereira: What's Next. Last week I decided to go back to the project that started off this newsletter, Fancynote

The long term goal of fancynote is something approaching a maintainable wiki. Sustainable digital gardening.

If you’re familiar with markdown you may be rolling your eyes right about now. This just looks like markdown with some extra brackets. But, there are a couple key differences here.

This language is super easy to parse. Seriously, the lexer and parser 2 combined come in at just over 100 lines. For contrast see the reference markdown parser commonmark. It’s trivial to define new functions as everything works and looks the same way.

It enables a learning loop (feedback loop) like no other, where you can be operating on one level (writing/notetaking), have an idea for a feature you wish you had (say, block level links), and jump right into implementing it. Of course this can be extremely dangerous to your productivity, but productivity isn’t the reason to do any of this.

A much better reason is to have fun, and closely following, to explore interesting ideas. There’s something lovely about a learning by taking notes with a notetaking tool you’re building to learn.

Two things I’m particularly excited for right now are making a repl and types.

*A REPL is read-evaluate-print-loop. Basically, it’s a terminal tied to a programming language. In particularly I’m interested in making an interactive environment in which I can query and process my notes.

I’ve been using notion a lot lately to collaborate with others and it has some fantastic features for treating notes like a database. I was trying to imagine how you could acheive something similar with a text-only constraint and was having a really hard time until the aha moment. If you view each note file as a program, you could just load that program up in a REPL and interact with it! This is extremely loosely speced out, but I think there’s something interesting here.*

What about typing?

If you want to have a series of notes where every entry must have a certain shape, you should be able to do that. Likewise, if you want to have notes be loose and fit any structure that should work too!