Will Crichton

String-first programming languages seem to be a really interesting and underexplored design space. I want something halfway between JSX and Scribble, but not MDX.

Requirements: * No quotes or escapes -- strings are the default, not the exception. * Allow transition between string and code dialects with as few characters as possible, and with arbitrary nesting. * Should be easy to define non-string data structures: lists, classes, lambdas

Scribble is by far the best example of this design, but I've found it hard to directly translate its concepts into JS / React. Eg sometimes you want to generate a string (say to pass to KaTeX or Penrose), sometimes you want to generate a React element.

Can you expand on this a little? Isn't sometimes having a string and sometimes having an expression what Scribble does? Or is this about how it translates to JS-like syntax?

Example of my current notation / translation: %def{msf}{\mathsf{#0}} @${hello #msf{world}} --> let msf = (...args) => "\mathsf{" + args[0] + "}" return React.createElement($, {}, "hello ", msf("world"));

I need three different sigils for function calls (#), React elements (@), and statements (%). In search of a simpler design, but this is currently what I have. Definitely more complex than Scribble, both bc domain reasons (React vs string) and lang reasons (stmt != expr).

The stmt/expr distinction doesn't seem like it requires the notation distinction -- it's more that in Scribble everything can be done with function-call syntax b/c parentheses.