Hi everyone! I am a developer, currently at Epic Games. My interest in development tools started with making 4coder, a text editor (that I still use now!). In the course of that project I realized I couldn't achieve most of the things I would want to because of the limits of the text-file-centric paradigm. Last year I started exploring how to build something outside of that paradigm with a small team and in my research I discovered the FoC community. I've been lurking on the edges since then. I'm interested to see more of what other people out there are doing.

hi. I am in Dion Discord 🙂

Welcome Allen. You can find some videos of what I'm working on in my introduction above, but the main idea is to treat code like first-class data. Give it a proper meta-model and then manipulate it in an MVC environment. With MVC, you separate the data representation from your views of the data so that you can have multiple views, perhaps simultaneously, with each offering something different. A good example of this is a spreadsheet which lets you look at the same data in a grid, a bar chart and a line chart all at once. For code, you could have lots of different views for different purposes. Maybe a few different text versions, because text is easy to search and cut&paste and edit quickly, more structured form based views for features you rarely use and need better prompting and validation, UML diagrams to get a better high-level overview of your code's relationship to other pieces of data, or specialized editors for GUI's, internationalization messages, requirements, unit tests, parsers, security settings, documentation, etc.

Welcome Allen! Dion has come up quite a few times here ever since those first gifs were tweeted out. It looks like a fascinating project. Glad to have you here, and I look forward to seeing what new things you're working on. For anyone looking for some links to the things Allen has worked on: • http://4coder.net • http://dion.systems • https://media.handmade-seattle.com/dion-systems/

@Kevin Greer That sounds pretty fascinating, thanks! @Ivan Reese Oh awesome! Thanks for finding my links for me 🙂

hey @Allen Webster, good to see you here 😄