Do you ever wish you could write code with the help of a nicer notation, maybe notation from mathematics∞ or music♩? Maybe you’ve wanted to draw a decision tree instead of writing a sequence of if-statements?… Could allowing people to write code containing familiar notations help make programming easier to learn? Could enabling programmers to write code using domain-specific notations make those domains more accessible? How can we make editing diagrams and notations feel natural in the context of a text editor?

This presentation discusses the questions I’ve explored while working on Polytope (https://elliot.website/editor/). Polytope is an experimental code editor that allows for writing source code using a combination of text-based and visual languages.