Re:Pollen: the book is a program
by velcrovan on Wednesday May 29, 2019 @10:09AM
(#20040343)
Interestingly, the author of Pollen attempted to write it in Pollen first, then switched to Racket.
> “I wrote the initial version of Pollen in Python. I devised a simplified markup-notation language for the source files. This language was compiled into XML-ish data structures using ply (Python lex/yacc). These structures were parsed into trees using LXML. The trees were combined with templates made in Chameleon. These templates were rendered and previewed with the Bottle web server.
> “Did it work? Sort of. Source code went in; web pages came out. But it was also complicated and fragile. Moreover, though the automation was there, there wasn’t yet enough abstraction at the source layer. I started thinking about how I could add a source preprocessor.”
> “I wrote the initial version of Pollen in Python. I devised a simplified markup-notation language for the source files. This language was compiled into XML-ish data structures using ply (Python lex/yacc). These structures were parsed into trees using LXML. The trees were combined with templates made in Chameleon. These templates were rendered and previewed with the Bottle web server.
> “Did it work? Sort of. Source code went in; web pages came out. But it was also complicated and fragile. Moreover, though the automation was there, there wasn’t yet enough abstraction at the source layer. I started thinking about how I could add a source preprocessor.”
[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/Backstory.html#%28part._...