// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Smolts: A pedagogical IDE for a teaching language
Screenshot of smolts showing object1.smol. Click to embiggen.
Two years ago, I built an IDE for a teaching language based on Shriram
Krishnamurthi et al.’s work on teaching SMoL, the “Standard
Model of Languages”, as part of PLAI. The project was directly
inspired by the marvellous work of Kuang-Chen Lu and Shriram
in developing Stacker.
The idea was to use it in teaching Programming Languages. I haven’t (yet) actually used it for
that, but I figure I may as well let people know it exists.
With it, you can write programs in an S-expression-based dialect of SMoL, if you see what I
mean, and step through them. The IDE shows you a rendering of the current continuation,
environment, and store as the program executes. It also annotates the program directly in the
text editor to show the values of variables and expressions.
You can step backwards, which is helpful if you were clicking too fast and missed a detail,
and you can also “run to cursor”.
I think there’s a lot of promise there that is not yet fully realised: the idea of in-browser
git-based project management is really cool, and while the implementation is janky and
half-complete at present, I think it’s fairly evocative of the idea. There are also still
several bugs to do with Svelte state-management.
Anyway, give it a try. Comments, remarks, pull requests welcome! You
can email me or tag me on
fedi.
This video was recorded in July 2024 and shows a slightly older version of the system, but the
core operation is the same as the current version.