About CraftSyntax

01 / A personal interest

A craft can recognise its own language.

I was introduced to TeX about 35 years ago, to Lisp’s macro system in the late 1980s, and to Forth’s ever-expanding dictionaries in the 1990s. Alongside them came Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and other role-playing games, decades ago.

TeX showed me one simple principle: you can take a craft—in this case, typesetting—use that craft’s own language and terms, and computerise them. The craftspeople can still understand the code with very little relearning.

That possibility has stayed with me: a computer language can belong to the people who practise the craft.

02 / A dissatisfaction with tools

Tools should be clever.

CraftSyntax also springs from a keen dissatisfaction with tools for creating role-playing game characters. One tool required me to advance a character one level at a time.
I abandoned it.

When I needed a 9th-level fighter with Cleave and Whirlwind Attack, I just created a 9th-level fighter and backfilled the choices. That is expertise: the complex is simplified, intelligent defaults get used, and the shortcuts people use become part of the process.

A useful tool should understand that way of working. It should put the expertise of the craft into its defaults and support the shortcuts its users already know.

03 / The pleasure of finding things out

And it’s fun.

It’s epistemological: an exploration of what we know and how we know it. It requires analysis and synthesis—taking ideas apart, putting them together, and finding new things out all the time.

And you’re never short of some trivial piece of information that can wow a crowd or help you escape a tedious conversation.