Turning my web app for Burmese song lyrics with guitar chords into an open source PWA songbook app. I’ll try to turn it into some kind of offline available song book that you can host on github pages.

Don’t give up!

I’m thinking more along the line of ubiquitous offline first PWAs. Imagine google doc running offline in a browser and being able to edit local docs directly. I guess secure file system access is one of the major road blocks, though I’m not sure of the challenges associated with coming up with a standard for this.

I started my career as C# dev and thought highly of Java because it’s what C# is ripping off of. Then I actually tried writing Java and had a new found appreciation for C#. This was over 10 years ago though.

I’m still hoping for browsers to become some kind of open standard application environments and web apps to become actual apps running on this environment.

What do you think of zig?

I think elixir/erlang is also in the same class of languages as clojure in that sense. A lot of lisp-like languages tend to go into that trend, I guess. I love working in it.

May be my headspace was a bit too much in systems that benefit from rapid prototyping. Other class of systems might benefit greatly from type safety and unit tests. Even though, I still felt a bit iffy about unit tests and almost ideological spouting points of it. I struggled with unit testing for a few years and now I just use them for automation of bigger picture behaviour testing. Call them integration tests or whatever.

Watching it now. So far he’d been describing exactly what I had in mind. Thanks for this!

Oh, I completely forgot about smalltalk. Better look into again.

It’s the same with elixir and it’s interactive REPL! I really love working with it.

I wouldn’t say it’s in a bad place either. Most enterprise grade technologies already have great debugging tools. Sure, those hot reloads, live updates are nice for UI development. But, I was thinking more of something built from the ground up to be, well, “feedback driven” in general. Most new stuffs that came out in the last decade touted their compiler as a killer feature first and rest of the tools are only developed as the ecosystem mature. May be that’s just the best way to go about creating new successful language ecosystems, I don’t know. Sorry if it feels like I’m being vague about the specifics. That’s because I really only have vague ideas about whole the whole thing would work.

I’ve looked into Elixir livebook that’s probably inspired by jupyter before. Yeah, something like that but for a much more general use case.

I’d imagine there would be no need to give up type safety, unit testing and all that though. I’m thinking more about language and tool creators’ focus and efforts going mostly into compiler and type safety.

Nice, JetBrains does not disappoint. It’s been a long time since I last used one of their tools. What I’m hoping for is the first-class usage of a similar tool. There would be no debug mode. May be you can say the “debugger” starts as soon as you open up your project and is constantly giving you feedback as you code. For me, I value frequent feedback with potentially unsafe code over having to satisfy the compiler. Sure, having both would be nice as well.

infinitest looks interesting though. Will check it out, though I’m not much of a Java dev.

I am familiar with hot reloads. What I had in mind was something more fine-grained, not just the UI. A simple example would be that I declared a function signature. Then I write a test. As I start to implement the function, there would be constant feedback visible based on the inputs to the functions from test I wrote. If I declare a variable ‘x’ by adding function params ‘let x = y + z’, the feedback view would show a watch expression of x based on the test’s input. If I changed it to ‘let x = y * z’, the watch expression would immediately change. I would be constantly seeing the result of my actions. May be this is asking for too much with the current technology we have. I don’t know.