

An Introduction to Nitra - oal
http://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2013/11/12/an-introduction-to-nitra/

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breckinloggins
This gets us ever closer to the goals of the elusive (and presumably
abandoned?) Grok project [1].

I'd love to see syntax highlighters (like Pygments), editors and IDEs,
autocompletion providers, debuggers, and all other language-related tooling
consume a standardized canonical "language description format". Making a new
language? Bam! It's automatically supported by Visual Studio, Eclipse, Emacs,
vim, Sublime Text, gdb, Pygments, the list goes on.

The extension capabilities are also awesome. Let's say I have a huge project
and, at a certain level of abstraction, users aren't allowed to use
fprintf(stderr, ...), they need to use LOG(...). It would be great to have a
file in your project that can tell your environment to give you the "red
squigglies" and autofix information for such situations.

[http://bsumm.net/2012/08/11/steve-yegge-and-
grok.html](http://bsumm.net/2012/08/11/steve-yegge-and-grok.html)

~~~
nswanberg
Steve spoke about Grok earlier this year:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRO3dNJx5Dw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRO3dNJx5Dw)
(sadly the video is only worth listening to), and at the end of the talk
guesses there would be more public information 1.5 years from then.

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turbolent
Looks very similar to OMeta
([http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/](http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/))

~~~
hhariri
Does OMeta allow extending existing languages or provide tooling around it
such as analysis, refactoring, navigation?

~~~
turbolent
It's object-oriented and especially designed to be extensible. The slides on
the pages contain many examples. It's fairly stand-alone and isn't integrated
into an IDE. However, it's small, which allows for easy implementation (see
original OMeta in Smalltalk, Ometa/JS, Ometa#, etc.) and could be used as a
base for implementing these IDE features.

I'd love to see a cleanup of OMeta/JS and combining it with CodeMirror.

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SuddsMcDuff
I hope some of the work they've done filters back into Nemerle. A lot of
people were very excited when JetBrains picked up the Nemerle team but it's
not clear that they have any intention of supporting the project - they just
wanted the team...

~~~
hhariri
The Nemerle team is still active and the project is very much alive. In
addition, Nitra uses Nemerle.

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radicalbyte
I've been waiting for this for a year; the idea of having a language-within-a-
language is extremely powerful.

Take our product: we have javascript, typescript, XML and SQL stored in
strings in our C# codebase. As you can expect, these are really hard to
maintain, and just has hard to move to separate templates.

Oh, did I mention that we also have our own templates, our own DSL, handlbar
templates, jQuery templates and templates used in various libraries.

Nitra can support that all in one tool.

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sebkomianos
Am I being too simplistic when I think the following holds?

Easier to make a DSL => Wider adoption of new languages => Better grounds for
experimentations => Much more creative stuff => More accessible technology

~~~
hhariri
Don't see why not...

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_random_
This is so awesome! I hope the resulting assemblies will be PCL though.

