[chrisoakman]

Hi folks -- I've been working with Shaun on the tail end of this project.

Have an early prototype of Parinfer working with the Atom editor here: https://github.com/oakmac/atom-parinfer

It's pretty early software, but feedback appreciated :)

[cnp]

Parinfer + Atom -- what a dream come true. Awesome work. (Edit: just took it for a spin, and it "just works", even with atom-vim -- doubly awesome. I really feel like having to navigate parens while learning the language was such a barrier to diving in to ClojureScript. Cant wait to get started.)

[chrisoakman]

This comment makes me so happy; thank you :)

I'm glad it "just works"!

[omginternets]

Your project seriously makes me want to learn lisp.

[tripzilch]

Me too!

And I already wanted to learn Lisp. Because I kind of half-assumed this tool to be there already :-P

I always assumed, obviously Lisp didn't get this popular if people had to keep track of all their parentheses. Sure they probably had to in "the old days" (although I wonder even when?). It just seems like a tedious thing to have to do in order to work with such a consistently structured language.

Of course you can get most of it with highlighting matching parens and auto-formatting shortcuts. Like most languages.

But I kind of expected Lisp tooling to go the extra mile. Because it is that structured.

From my limited knowledge of Lisp, I figured some vague ideas on how such a tool would work / should be designed. It's kind of cool to see that the author's initial steps match up with that idea: define a grammar, some invariants, and "have at it" (ok, so I didn't figure that far). And then he made it work!

Maybe a silly question, but since the author is in this thread: Was it hard to make? :-)

BTW the idea of switching between these two modes is a very clever approach to keeping certain invariants invariant while still being able to modify the code--because the trivial way to preserve the invariant would be the tool immediately reverting your edit :)

[herrvogel-]

I can't thank you enough for this! It's just awesome! I really enjoy learning Clojure / ClojureScript and with Parinfer it will be even more fun! Thanks

[l1ambda]

Wow. Could it also work with JavaScript?

[chrisoakman]

Not really due to the fundamental difference between Lisp and JavaScript syntax.

You could borrow the idea of indentation inferring function scope structure and make a plugin that would modify JavaScript syntax accordingly, but I'm not sure that would even be desirable when writing JavaScript.

Parinfer is made possible by Lisp's unique syntax.

[lemming]

Check out Kent Beckman's Prune for ideas along this line: https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/prune-a-code-editor.... It's not quite the same since it's more like an enforced paredit, but it contains a lot of similar ideas and also enforces indentation.