Babbler is small toy computing environment that is inspired by the programming model of Realtalk, the operating system used at Dynamicland. It is not trying to replicate Realtalk, but rather to explore the same programming model and hit some of the same design issues, in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the problem space.
I wrote a more thorough blog post about the project here
(bird pic by J.M Garg under Creative Commons License)
I finally published my end of jam writeup about &babbler here: https://forkingpaths.dev/posts/24-10-02/wheel_reinvention_jam_writeup.html
I explain the motivations of the project, how it works, how it differs from the wheel it's trying to reinvent, what insights I got from it and the new questions it raised.
I half-hacked variables at the last minute, as demonstrated by this little counter. I think that will be all for this jam! &babbler is obviously just a tiny computing toy at this point, but it's already pretty fun to play with.
Today I added a first spatial query to &babbler. You can detect if a card p points at another card q in a given direction d with a query of the form (when p points d at q). p, q, d can also be placeholders so you can react to several spatial relationships at once. The query itself triggers the drawing of "pointing whiskers" so you can visualize how cards point to each other.
Since it's impractical to precompute all possible spatial relationships, I introduced a notion of "responders" to the facts database, ie callbacks that can generate new facts on demand when a query matches a specific pattern. Next step is to add new spatial responders (ie proximity, clustering, etc) and hopefully allow such responders to be defined in user-code.
Reproducing a small DynamicLand tutorial in &babbler! This shows the use of claim, when and wish clauses, how to apply illuminations to the cards, and how to use placeholders in when clauses to match several claims.
Func facts! Not much progress today, but we're now registering claim clauses to a "facts" database, and matching when clauses with existing facts &babbler.
&babbler is a little experiment based on my misunderstanding of DynamicLand's Realtalk. Here's a a first jab at the UI, where you can put cards on a canvas and write code on them. Got immediately sidetracked into writing a little structure editor for the cards...
