Just a quick update on isomorf.io, we are bootstrapping the projections on the platform itself and so soon you will be able to design and implement your own. Stay tuned.
Interesting. Thanks for the feedback. I think you are probably right that it sounds cool and appealing as a dev, but it's likely not a great use of resources in the short term.
Those sorts of general syntactic sugars are something we've put a lot of work into. (Currently if statements, for loops, for comprehensions, ternary operations, etc are all just sugar and don't affect the underlying source.) We also plan to expose the underlying format on the platform and let users write their own transforms. So people can invent and share their own intuitive or concise representations and have them applied everywhere immediately (and also shared with other users).
In terms of applications, our initial work has been to export functions as microservices onto existing platforms (e.g., Lambda). We've also explored downloading code as either native artifacts (e.g., maven) or as command-line apps. We are also playing around with adding integrations for ReactJS to support web applications. Where we focus our deployment efforts is one of our current big questions, and one where we are most interested in community feedback.
In terms of the abstraction, you are quite right that the examples we've shown are very trivial, really just to convey the concepts. The more interesting work will probably be sharing much more complex functions, or sharing the built app/services themselves (which could be made transparent within the platform itself).
Definitely reach out if you have more thoughts or feedback!
Happy the blog post helped. One update is that we've moved to an entirely keyboard-based model for editing, so there is only minimal mouse work now. More details here if you are interested: https://blog.isomorf.io/an-experiment-in-structured-code-edi...
Real-world examples are in the works! Side effects and integration use-cases will be a part of our beta release. If you have specific integrations you are interested in, let us know. Thanks!
Thanks! Learning is certainly an application we've considered. We have found significant interest in structured editing paradigms from those newer to coding and those who find the code-as-text paradigm frustrating/limiting. But we certainly aren't setting out to change the minds of people proficient and happy with text editing.
Yeah, we use the beaker to mean unit tests. We like the icons because they keep the layout dense, but if the meanings aren’t clear that is good feedback for us
No worries, we were able to get accounts. It seems like an awesome community! We posted and have gotten a great response. Lots of encouragement and good feedback. There was even some talk of Intentional Programming and Charles Simonyi, which I'm sure you'll appreciate. Happy to extend you an invitation if you want one.