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by patricksli 2879 days ago
Good question. Jonathan and I both from a lisp background and are used to crafting DSLs out of s-expressions (which is what we normally do).

For JITX, we're using a language called Stanza, which provides decorated s-expressions out of the box. It's basically still just s-expressions, but it looks prettier.
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ur-whale 2879 days ago
From experience of having to add a full blown scripting language to two large domain-specific professional GUI applications in the 90's, and at the risk of upsetting the HN LISP crowd, you should go for something with a broader appeal/base than LISP and similar languages.

LISP and languages of the same ilk are extremely powerful and esthetically pleasing for CS-minded folks, but they are also and unfortunately rather off-putting for the wast majority of technical, non-CS folks (which IUUC is your target audience).

I'd go for Python, in spite of the lack of typing: easy to integrate, massive amount of libraries, very flexible.

An at the risk of committing blasphemy, I have to mention that the EDA folks seem to have a terrible addiction to TCL, which therefore makes it something you may want to consider.

My opinion of course, the best would be to poll your target audience.

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patricksli 2879 days ago
Stanza is our implementation language. If you're interested, you can check out the website www.lbstanza.org. It looks pretty similar to Python, plus it also has types!
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PeCaN 2879 days ago
>An at the risk of committing blasphemy, I have to mention that the EDA folks seem to have a terrible addiction to TCL, which therefore makes it something you may want to consider.

Tcl is very, very Lispy, so perhaps a Lisp is not the worst idea.

Great job giving advice, I'm sure it will be very helpful to hear from some random internet user.

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haliax 2879 days ago
Is this L.B. Stanza or something else?

Also: this is awesome! I'm a software engineer now working with hardware and built a straw man of this for myself a little while back (a sequence of python functions that generate eaglescript commands to make a PCB), but obviously it didn't even do 0.001% as much.

I checked out your site, but didn't see a way to launch the tool. How can I get access? (I'm working on a side project involving a BLE watch based around the nRF52840).

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patricksli 2879 days ago
Yup this is L.B. Stanza!

The tool is still internal for now. We're operating as a design service today, and our own engineers use the tool to produce designs quicker than other human-powered competitors.

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haliax 2879 days ago
Fair enough. I'd love to chat a bit about this -- any chance you'd be willing to move to e-mail? (in my profile)
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