[ryansouza]

Part of the reason I settled on beancount over h/ledger was the ease of writing python plugins to handle mutations and rules, and reuse the official parse/output as a library.

Plaintext is nice for git but I only feel that when fixup-ing a single or small number of transactions. It does feel nice to be have all the details of a transaction in one place in a visually useful way. For one-off hacking and such it definitely feels easier to write O(n^4) python looping over trying to describe things with SQL and working at a scale where it doesn’t matter.

Plaintext as a UI into a SQL store seems an interesting project. I would love a git integration for committing changes after diff review and being able to stage individual txns or parts. Many years ago I was frustrated with ledger’s more loosey goosey syntax and trying these things and eventually gave up whatever the idea was at the time. I like the idea of a constant bidrectional sql<->plaintext that provides a requirement for reproducible parsing and serializing