I've been reading the The Power of Structure in chunks. Your Rune section was really beginning to sell me, but I'm confused about something.
I'm trying to imagine my existing Notes as a tree of objects instead of text parsed into an ad-hoc tree. Ok, that sounds good. I could imagine a leaf node being a "blurb", which itself could be something easy and familiar like a string. I could imagine it sitting beside a table, and nested under a bullet point.
I can imagine my up/right/left/down keybindings getting smarter, as I move from "left" or "outside" of a table then it might highlight itself, indicating that I'm selecting it like I would select any heading and can drill down into it.
I can imagine instead navigating up, to the text, and there being a seamless transition so that I'm editing that text just like I normally would in Emacs.
I can imagine navigating "out" and into the tree structure of the bullet points / headings. I already use packages to easily navigate my headings, and so I like the idea.
But when I read this:
> See, even words have structure. Are words objects? We wouldn't have a word for them if they weren't significant somehow. And that's how I would want to analyze and work with them: as words. For the plain text editor, a word is just a cluster of characters somewhere in a string, and there's a whole pile of mess built on top of that string to convince you otherwise.
and this:
> Your word was supposed to be an object that carries information about itself.
I start to worry about performance. Is this something like the old Flyweight Pattern from GoF? Is this level of granularity no longer expensive?
Good question. (Incidentally, it provides a good example for my words in the comment you have replied to.)
Words could be objects. But I will tell you more: you can start breaking words into characters and making them objects too, if you needed to. The key to performance here is to do the necessary stuff on the fly, on demand, dynamically. In other words, the word may become an object only when it needs to become a seperate entity. Suppose you use some data structure for storing sentences or paragraphs. Let's assume it's just a list. So, before a word needs to become an object that stores some information about itself, it can just be a string:
'("This" " " "is" " " "a" "sentence" ".")
Now, if you wanted to tag the word "This" with some info (like stylization), you could turn that word into a more complex object:
In fact, if your application requires such an optimization, you could even store it as a simple string
"This is a sentence."
You can choose whatever storage unit you like, as long as you can make your editor work with it. Structural approach allows specialization on the fly, you can just adapt to the granularity when you need it, since there's just full programmatic access.
I'm trying to imagine my existing Notes as a tree of objects instead of text parsed into an ad-hoc tree. Ok, that sounds good. I could imagine a leaf node being a "blurb", which itself could be something easy and familiar like a string. I could imagine it sitting beside a table, and nested under a bullet point.
I can imagine my up/right/left/down keybindings getting smarter, as I move from "left" or "outside" of a table then it might highlight itself, indicating that I'm selecting it like I would select any heading and can drill down into it.
I can imagine instead navigating up, to the text, and there being a seamless transition so that I'm editing that text just like I normally would in Emacs.
I can imagine navigating "out" and into the tree structure of the bullet points / headings. I already use packages to easily navigate my headings, and so I like the idea.
But when I read this:
> See, even words have structure. Are words objects? We wouldn't have a word for them if they weren't significant somehow. And that's how I would want to analyze and work with them: as words. For the plain text editor, a word is just a cluster of characters somewhere in a string, and there's a whole pile of mess built on top of that string to convince you otherwise.
and this:
> Your word was supposed to be an object that carries information about itself.
I start to worry about performance. Is this something like the old Flyweight Pattern from GoF? Is this level of granularity no longer expensive?