One of the major reasons that I decided to come to work on the Oslo team was the experience I had with what was going to become MGrammar. I was interested in prototyping some language and compiler design ideas, and I knew that the Oslo team had some technologies that might help me out, specifically a parser generator. They helpfully pointed me to their source code, I enlisted, built and started to play around. I’d been building some parser technology by hand, but I quickly discarded it once I started playing around with MGrammar in Intellipad. In addition to giving me a bunch of things that I needed, it was also just really… fun. I mean, it was cool to bring up a buffer, start hammering on a syntax and then put in an example and see the result pop up. Or, as was the case most of the time, not pop up. Tweak, tweak, tweak and then… boom! the result shows up.
This storyline is one that I’ve heard a number of times internally and even seen externally a time or two. People just have a great time playing around with grammars and languages and seeing what they can get to come out. There’s frustration, sure, but then there’s also a big payoff when you finally see it working—look what I created!
I hadn’t really thought a lot about it until I came across a presentation that Daniel Cook (author of the Lost Garden blog) gave at an OfficeLabs meeting entitled “Mixing Games and Applications.” He says it a lot better than I can, but I intuitively think that I (and others) enjoy fooling around with MGrammar in Intellipad precisely because it taps in to game playing part of our brain. I’m not sure how to capitalize on that further, but it’s interesting food for thought…