Sadie

Sadie is a programming language I’ve been working on this year. I’ve long wanted a little DSL that makes it easy and fun to write random text generators. Inspired by tabletop RPGs, I imagined a language with first-class support for dice and tables.1 A built-in system for grammars and generating text, something like Tracery at the language level, also seemed appealing.

I started out thinking of Sadie as a Lisp for interactive documents. Over time, I switched to a shell for procedural generation. I think the design goals have moved somewhere in between the two of those. I want the homoiconicity and interactivity of Lisps,2 along with the batteries-included, vectorized, point-free convenience of shell scripting.

Non-goals include:

  • General-purpose programming: I could see Sadie growing into other domains, like interactive notebooks or 2D graphics, but for now the focus is narrowly on procedural text generation.
  • Macros and meta-programming: Homoiconicity paves the way for advanced features like these, and I want to leave that door open, but more than that I want Sadie to be beginner-friendly, and macros are a big bucket of complexity.
  • Flexible output formats: Sadie will target the web, and just the web, for now. The ideal Sadie output is a web component you can stick on a page or share via some hosted URL.
  • JavaScript interop: I had big plans for flexible JS interop, but again, that invites an npmjs.com-sized ball of complexity that I’d rather not deal with. Maybe someday.
  • Module system and package management: I’m also leaving these aside. A robust standard library is a goal, and hopefully addresses 80% of the need for third-party packages for now.

Footnotes

  1. Jeremy Valentine’s dice-roller plugin for Obsidian planted the seed for this idea several years ago. I loved how easy it was to add an interactive dice roller to a document, and not just for numbers—you could roll on tables, lists, paragraphs, and all sorts of text objects. I eventually moved away from Obsidian (Electron was too slow for my old ThinkPad), but Jeremy’s plugin is still a guiding example for Sadie. ↩

  2. I say Lisps, but Sadie now draws more heavily from a different branch of homoiconic languages: the Rebol, Red, and Rye side of the family tree. ↩