This is my second update for the Fall/2022 funding of Maria.cloud by ClojuristsTogether.

Work has progressed well overall, with most of Maria’s original curriculum now rendering nicely in the new editor. Highlights include:

  • The Cells library has been re-implemented to work in sci.
  • A large portion of Maria’s value viewing behaviour has been implemented, including views for shapes and cells.
    • TODO: The plan is to bring in Clerk’s viewer code into Maria so that we can use all of Clerk’s built-in viewers, and any custom viewers built for Clerk would also work in Maria.
  • I’ve added support for top-level await so that evaluation can pause for blocks that must complete before the rest of the document can run. Vars are handled as a special case, so that one can await the value of a def form.
    • TODO: implement an async-load-fn for sci as described here so that users can import arbitrary js deps and lazy-load ClojureScript namespaces.
  • Namespace lookup When evaluating within a code block, we determine the current namespace by moving “up” from the node until we find an evaluated ns form (defaulting to user). The alternative (default) behaviour would be to use the namespace from the REPL’s internal state, which is more likely to confuse users who are looking at a document as a top-to-bottom flow.
  • Namespaces in curriculum: all Maria docs will now include an ns form instead of the previous behaviour of having lots of built-in tools in scope automatically.
  • doc/arglists coverage was improved, by fixing this in sci
  • Implemented the eldoc feature for seeing docs/arglists for the current operation
  • Implemented UI for editing links and images via a tooltip within prose blocks

For more details see the commit log.

Thanks again to ClojuristsTogether for supporting this work!

Remaining high-priority tasks include:

  • Command palette (needs to handle ProseMirror, CodeMirror, hybrid & other commands)
  • Curriculum (integration into UI / sidebar)
  • Persistence (local storage and publishing to GitHub gists)
  • Error messages (a lot of the original code for this won’t work now that we’ve changed the evaluator)

— Matt