Looking for people to playtest a programming language for making websites
November 20, 2024
I’d love to find a few new people to try out the Origami programming language for creating websites — maybe you?
Maybe you have any of these goals:
- Are thinking of making a site for a passion project but aren’t sure how
- Have an existing site you want to move off a platform (WordPress, say) to something you control
- Want to try rewriting a site to add more features
- Want a site where you understand how it’s made
and you:
- Are familiar with basic HTML and CSS (JavaScript knowledge is not required)
- Can use a code editor (doesn’t matter which one)
- Have some minimal experience running commands in a terminal window
The Origami programming language complements HTML and CSS to let you define the structure of a site. You write formulas or expressions at roughly the level of complexity of spreadsheet formulas. These fully determine the site you get; nothing happens unless you ask for it.
The language is concise and powerful. The above screenshot shows the code for a sample influencer lifestyle blog. Those ~15 lines of code establish the basic site structure, and another 20 lines in other files prepare the raw content and produce the blog feed. That’s all that’s required to define a blog engine completely from scratch. For comparison, a typical blog engine might require much more code in its configuration file alone and be much harder to reason about.
A playtest is generally done as a video call. You outline your goals and then either go through an Origami tutorial or we work together to start something from scratch. At this stage of the language’s evolution, direct observation is extremely helpful. Some people find that prospect intimidating, but this is a playtest! We will test the language — no one will be testing you.
The Origami documentation is complete enough that a motivated person could potentially get up and running on their own, but the onboarding won’t be as easy as with an already well-established, mature language.
If interested, please contact me!