Hi Matthias Thanks for your additional comments.
On Sat, 25 Aug 2018, 22:19 Matthias Felleisen, <matth...@felleisen.org> wrote: > > 1. Some of what you’re asking for seems to exist. I am not an expert on > office software, and the little I see gets the work done for staff but > looks awful to me as a quasi-sw-dev. So, do you want to save money, or is > there really a significant market gap, or is your intent to build good > products that you can eventually sell as a separate sideline of your > business? > In the balance, it will certainly cost more "time-money" to develop a solution than to choose one off the shelf. So my interest is not to save money. Instead, I (whether rightly or wrongly) believe that this would represent a genuine innovation. I'm not interested in selling to others. If I do the work I would open source in the hope that others would contribute ideas/code. If someone else wanted to collaborate and they wanted to sell it then I would also be open to that. I've surveyed the legal case management systems and they seem to generally be extended versions of Outlook networked together: you have a mailbox, a tasklist, a notepad, a calendar etc which you keep up-to-date and in sync. What I want to do is to combine all this into a single set of DSLs. There is no way to have an appointment without being able to point to who created and in relation to what. There can be no record of contact information, without pointing to where it came from. It's not really a gap I'm seeing in the market, more an itch I want to scratch. On the one hand I'm frustrated at going back over notes in order to retrieve information. Some of my projects are over 3,000 pages long. On the other hand, I don't want to create lots of separate systems (contact management, calendar systems etc) which then have to be kept in sync with my notes. It's too easy to forget and for them to fall out of sync. If there is already software for embedding business information into documents then I would certainly be interested. 2. Sw people routinely see DSLs as a panacea and the staff who ends up > using them want nothing to do with them (unless the DSLs are literally > invisible to them). A great example is the “financial contracts” effort by > Simon Peyton Jones (GHC co-creator, UK) and Marc Eber (financial/MBA-style > expert, Paris France). The latter took their joint paper and turned it into > a company for financial traders who deal with complex contracts. 10 years > on, he reported on his experience and the near-failure experience. The > financial traders (French and Hungarian clients if I recall this correctly) > hated to work with the DSL and program editors even though there was > clearly value to it They were used to spreadsheet-like software, and they > had always done it that way, and they didn’t want to change their ways. So > Eber added a GUI to his financial DSL and all of a sudden, it became a > reasonable success. > Thanks for this useful warning. Since my target is my own staff, and they are already editing text files in text editors (markdown plus YAML), I'm not too worried about this. It may be because lawyers are extremely detail-oriented and used to complying with rules and requirements that may not always actually make much sense! > Now Racket has the kind of GUI framework that allows you to connect DSLs > with interaction — beyond what drracket provides. > Yes, currently my vision is more limited. I think I'm already biting off more than I can chew. For now, DrRacket with a little syntax highlighting and a couple of extra buttons is the limit of my ambition. > [[ We do have a research effort running here at Northeastern, dubbed > define-editor, that sounds like it would be helpful if it were done. Right > now, your examples might merely serve as a good example and motivational > case for our effort. ]] > Well that sounds interesting. If there is anything that I can do to help motivate the project members then don't hesitate to let me know. I searched "define-editor racket" online, but I can't find anything so I'm guessing it isn't public yet? Many thanks Richard -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
