Conception is an experimental research project, meant to become a modern IDE/Language package. It experiments with discarding old conventions that were based on computational limitations (e.g. breaking code into files on a file system), and tries to make the process of coding as efficient as possible. I'm a fan of ideas from Bret Victor's talks, Light Table, Code Bubbles, Subtext, and of course I have ideas of my own.
My main guiding principle is to eliminate unnecessary duplication.
It started off from this tweet.
Please steal any good ideas you see here. I'd rather have them benefit the world than die in obscurity.
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Right now it's often easier to write code from scratch to do something, rather than find existing code that already does it. Conception is about flipping that.
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Conversely, code you write today is dead on arrival, no one (not even you) is likely to ever reuse it. Millions of ppl's efforts are wasted. Must make Conception so that we can encode complicated things in available formats. Make data-mining, machine-learning, computer vision algorithms as easily accessible as file.open, sort, hashmaps, other stuff available via standard libraries. Let the underlying technological improvements (new tools) propogate to current/old/future apps. Consider writing graphics code for latest ATI video card w/ new extensions, vs. "for the average user" - intention might be the same, just a difference of available tools.
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Instead of dumbing down code for the existing tools, why not make more advanced tools to read code as if debugging the program. (https://twitter.com/shurcooL/status/156526541214457856)
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What if you could change the public API of a library (in order to improve it) without breaking an unknown number of things that use the said library. That would require the dependencies to be known, and editable. That is not currently possible, but it may be possible if all code is within one open system. The payoff would be the ability to improve anything without fear of breakage; nothing would have to be written in stone.
These WIP screenshots present a partial outlook into the things I'm prototyping.
