
Intentional Programming demo (Part 2) - Compiler
About this video
Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.
Why it appears in the archive
HN cites it as an early demo of projectional, AST-based programming whenever editors, code views or non-text programming come up.
AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.
From the Hacker News discussion
I am interested in seeing what happens when you apply intentional programming to web [VIDEO] idea is to open up your search engine so that anyone can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains. Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.
Read original comment ↗I wonder if it would make sense to make a search engine platform where (more technical) users can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains. Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service. This is sort of like intentional programming, but applied to [VIDEO]
Read original comment ↗It's a shame the Intentional Software crew have been nearly silent for the a decade or so they've been in business. They've been doing projections-of-ASTs based programming for a very long time. They bragged a lot about it early on and I haven't heard much of anything since. Here are a couple of demo vids from well over 10 years ago: [LINK] [VIDEO] Here's an interview from 2009 where one of the crew members talks about an annotated S-expression as the core code representation (IIRC, it's been a long time since I listened to it) [LINK]
Read original comment ↗Intentional Software was working on a system like this many years ago: [LINK] Part 2: [VIDEO] You can project your programs into different views and add lots of metadata about the program and use that data in various contexts. Also extends to source control and other use cases. It looked really neat. I'm not sure what happened to it.
Read original comment ↗