September 10, 2014

Projectional Editing

I have written on this blog before about my attempts at building a structural editor which turns the parsing equation upside down. Today I learned there is a name for what I have been trying to create: Projectional Editing. The top hit when googling that term comes from Martin Fowler; which is nice as I based some of my work on his articles on language workbenches.

I stumbled on this terminology through a presentation on InfoQ titled "The Art of Building Tools–A Language Engineering Perspective". It's showing examples of this technique in different contexts. Some pretty low-level programmer stuff, but also in the realm of requirements specification. Very cool.

A related presentation, also on InfoQ, is "Enhancing Notational Flexibility and Usability of Projectional Editors". This is showing off JetBrain's MPS, which is a language engineering workbench used as the backbone by the first presentation. I have stumbled on MPS before some years ago, but I think I may have to take a second look at it.

More interesting still is Aurora, a project being worked on by Chris Granger (of Light Table fame), which I'm desperate to take a closer look at. I'm not sure if Aurora is doing projectional editing, though it sure sounds like it. That and some other pretty crazy stuff (programming in a database !?).

I don't know about you guys and galls, but I'm looking forward to see where all this is going.

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