Amazing. Please do not abandon developing this. Almost all papers in computer science conferences are abandoned way way too soon and do not end up being used in the real world.
This looks quite promising. Is there any chance something like this can become an Emacs mode or NeoVim plugin? Features like these are neat, but without a giant ecosystem, as you yourself pointed out, a good feature isn't worth the loss.
You're right, packaging this system as a simple plugin for common editors is crucial. I use this thing every day, but only as a scratchpad - and I always miss my real editor. Porting to plugins should be fairly straightforward, apart from the inline html views. The editor API surface for plaintext interactions is tiny right now: callback on every change, get buffer contents as string, (async) replace position span with string. Inlining graphics in text always breaks the editing flow anyways. I don't like the heavyweight feel of blocks, so I never use this feature. Just checking the rough shape of data in plain text is good enough usually. It's also easy to hook the query macro into Clojure's tap system, so non-text output renders in a sidecar viewer like Portal (or Clerk, but haven't tried that). I like the flexibility of CodeMirror in the browser for quickly experimenting with other feature ideas that need more editor APIs than just plain text replacement. Sneak peek: render secrets such as capability tokens as opaque but copy/pasteable blocks; codebase-as-data a la Unison/Scrapscript; autocomplete with runtime values. But, yes, the most important interactive plaintext features will be available as plugins.
Yes, you can call it a different kind of REPL (or a programming environment with a runtime) that's always connected to _all_ the running processes (nodes) out there at the same time. And evaluation feels more like nodes pulling a specification (code) that's up to themselves to fulfill; instead of you imperatively pushing code to nodes that they should execute. All interaction happens via an mqtt broker, so it's more like a cljs browser repl in a way. Right now, the code editor runs in the browser (on CodeMirror with clojure-mode) but I plan on eventually turning this system into extensions for common editors and pre-packaged and/or easily embeddable runtimes for various platforms. It's not public yet, at this stage it's more of a research project / playground for even more unreleased ideas. Stay tuned! I'll put the very messy code on GitHub ~soon~.
