Prototype

This documentation site and its contents serve as the prototype for this prospectus. There are three main sections to the site.

1. The Introduction section covers the guiding philosophies and principles of the language, including an overview of RegEx, a concept that motivates the ambiguity features of the language.
2. The Language section contains individual reference pages for each proposed keyword of the language, on which readers can find a description, exact syntax, and usage example.
3. The Examples section contains three sample programs in the language. These pages give detailed explanations of how the features of the language work in conjunction, particularly as demonstrated in Possibilities.

This prototype addresses the guiding question: “how can a programming language embrace emotion and poetics?” The detailed documentation demonstrate how this language plays with syntax, structure, and logic to explore poetic possibilities within code.

Feedback session

• How would using this language make you feel?
  • Jay: Feels like going from C++ to Processing to p5.js. Breaking down more complexities and barriers. Why can’t all programming languages be this easy?
• What is frustrating or confusing about learning to code?
  • Daisy: JavaScript/jQuery scared me for a long time because of the confusing keywords and syntax. Confused about the $ symbol. HTML and CSS were less confusing, much more approachable.
  • Jay: The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) experience. Opening VSCode takes a lot of mental energy; Brackets less so; p5 the least. I don’t even mind if the language is a bit more complicated, when the IDE is as friendly as p5’s web editor.
    • → Develop online editor for the language, if time allows
• What could you imagine that would be an alternative to those frustrations?
  • Daisy: This puts the person back into code. p5.js builds community but the code itself feels removed from that.
    • → Ways to make the sense of community embedded within the code?
  • Daisy: The features are poetic, but make it intuitive
    • → Autocomplete/suggestion feature in editing environment
  • Jose: I read the regular expression as a string itself. It’s not usually correct, but you could even make my interpretation make sense with the space for ambiguities.
    • ambiguities → probabilities/possibilities. Not random. Nothing is 100% just one thing, but we can try to find the essence of it, what it’s most likely to be. Is about intentions