(2020-11-09) Pereira/45 Documents And Programs

Jared Pereira: 45: Documents and Programs. In this application, though, you’re not only interacting with text documents, there are also programs. These are special documents that are are dynamic. They change based on some internal state. You can modify that state by sending the document messages.

For example here’s a program I wrote to make a meditation log. It just renders out a list of meditation sessions, and you can send it a message with a time and some text and it’ll create a new entry.

To me, the obvious answer here is code. If the documents are defining their interactions in code, why not just let the user execute those functions directly? Essentially, give every program a command-line at the bottom.

One of the things I’ve been struggling with is how many different things this project rhymes with. It’s kinda like emacs but with javascript. Or, it’s kind of like literate programming. Or kinda like a fancy REPL. All of the above? (WikiKit)