Widip

Types? Where we're going, we don't need types!

Widip is an interactive environment for computing in modern systems. Many long-standing systems have thrived thanks to a uniform metaphor, which in our case is wiring diagrams.

System	Metaphor
Widip	Wiring Diagram
UNIX	File
Lisp	List
Smalltalk	Object

Installation

widip can be installed via pip and run from the command line as follows:

pip install widip
python -m widip

This will automatically install dependencies: discopy (computing, drawing), pyyaml (parser library), and watchdog (filesystem watcher).

Local install

If you're working with a local copy of this repository, run pip install -e ..

Using widip

The widip program starts a chatbot or command-line interface. It integrates with the filesystem for rendering diagram files. We give more information for a few use cases below.

For documentation

Widis are meant for humans before computers and we find it valuable to give immediate visual feedback. Changes in a .yaml file trigger rendering a .jpg file next to it. This guides the user exploration while they can bring their own tools. As an example, VS Code will automatically reload markdown previews when .jpg files change.

Widis are great for communication and this is a very convenient workflow for git- and text-based documentation.

For UNIX programming

The lightweight widish UNIX shell works everywhere from developer workstations to cloud environments to production servers. Processes that read and write YAML document streams are first-class citizens. With this practical approach users can write programs in the same language of widis.

Start with widish/examples.

For graphical programming

Programming is hard, but it shouldn't be that hard.

So far widis have mainly shaped the user interface. Widis are also graphical programming tools and one can work with them in purely mathematical terms. Start with examples/mascarpone then take a look at current work in a functional library at src.