Future of Coding is an online community with a welcoming, cooperative, and revolutionary spirit. We are unified in the belief that the common practice of programming is tragically less humane than it could be.

Future of Coding

<https://gist.github.com/tearflake/569db7fdc8b363b7d320ebfeef8ab503|A different take on s-expressions making them more.. visual>?

My feeling is that we don't need to push ASCII and ASCII art any more in 2025. ASCII was a necessity in 1960, but, today, we can draw closed figures and allow them to overlap - and, we can parse such drawings, for example, drawio and Excalidraw save drawings in XML format, which is parseable text. If one strongly prefers to stick with non-overlapping grids of small bitmaps, one can now use Unicode instead of ASCII and avoid stuff like """.

Yes, but…

I love the silliness/charm of it.

&gt; The question we may pose is: how much would we let the child inside us to play.

ASCII art or no, I do think s-expressions are calling out for more than just a textual representation. I've been inspired by Fructure ever since I first saw it: <https://github.com/disconcision/fructure|https://github.com/disconcision/fructure>

Something close to Fructure visually but generalized to work with any s-expression language could be very cool. Could allow for direct text entry akin to paredit but use nREPL for completions if you have it available