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356 points california-og | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
1. simpaticoder ◴[] No.42175187[source]
Really cool! I particularly liked your Python and SQLite demos. I find it interesting that you started with a through-the-web (TTW) editing loop, calling it a quine. While valid, the key weakness is persistance: TidlyWiki does basically the same thing, but saving your work is a headache because basically you need another headless server process to persist anything.

Personally, when wanting to do something similar[0], started with persistance, and of course this means files. Plain text files I can edit with my programmer's editor store and distribute using the file-system. This avoids the problem of having to recapitulate a programmers editor in the browser, which is non-trivial. In turn you have the problem of writing a fast server, but that is a rather fun problem to solve [1]. You side-stepped the problem by using basic content-editable sections, but it is a huge problem, second only to persistence.

One thing I see you face which I also faced is the fact you cannot export things from inside embedded scripts! This would be a nice feature to avoid mangling the global window object. (It would also, in my use case, make code generation easier.)

0 - Literate Markdown: https://simpatico.io/lit.md

1 - Reflector, what I call the small node server that transforms, zips and caches your markdown, with a filewatcher invalidator: https://simpatico.io/reflector