ser·en·dip·i·ty /ˌserənˈdipədē/ (n.) a fortunate discovery or development by happenstance
Author's Note: This project is in its infancy. This document reflects my aspirations for the project and not its current functionality. If you have stumbled upon this text somewhere out in the internet, you can always find the current status on the project's repository in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.
Serendipity is a highly extensible programming system that combines the best elements of many different programming paradigms and philosophies. The visual editor, [Camino][camino] provides an intuitive and novice-friendly environment to build and test programs in the browser, then deploy them to the cloud or other kinds of "agents."
There are numerous novice-friendly programming platforms, but none that offer all of the features that serendipity aims to deliver. In particular, it is inspired by projects such as Microsoft MakeCode, MIT Scratch, MIT AppInventor, and Snap!.
Compared to these platforms, Serendipity is designed for:
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ease of use, yet expansiveness in enabling its users to address complex problems. In short, it is not a toy. It is a platform that its users can grow into, rather than out of.
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flexibility. It can coherently express computations that execute on a wide variety of agents by following good, idiomatic standards in its language design.
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extensibility and specializability. It is easy to extend, modify, and tweak to provide custom behavior without sacrificing interoperability.
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integration. It can instrument and interact with numerous open-source services and devices with known APIs.
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modern workflows. A user can develop, build, test, and deploy applications from a single interface.
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functional programming. Existing visual programming languages (particularly blocks-based frameworks) made design decisions that leave them broadly incompatible with advanced functional programming. Serendipity is designed for functional designs first without sacrificing the ability to represent stateful and procedural components elegantly.
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social development. It emphasizes creation, remixing, and sharing. Users can develop collaboratively in teams on the same programs and projects, then share those creations with the world.
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privacy and control. It is private and secure by default, allowing users to retain control of their data. As much of the data as possible is processed on a device the user owns, and users can easily determine which parts of their data are transmitted to third parties.
Serendipity is written in TypeScript. This is a monorepo containing all of
Serendipity's many packages. You need Rush
(npm install -g @microsoft/rush or similar) to build the repository.
To install all dependencies and link inter-dependent packages within the repo:
$ rush update
Then, build the whole repository:
$ rush build
For information about contributing to Serendipity, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
In addition to the other platforms mentioned above in the "Why" section, all of which have been influential to the design of Serendipity, this project follows from research conducted in the Laboratory for Plaful Computation at the University of Colorado Boulder between 2017 and 2019 by Will Temple (me) and several collaborators. My work on BlockyTalky 3 influenced how I eventually chose to build the Serendipity runtimes and agents.
Some of Serendipity's language and editor features are inspired in part by Racket (graduated language levels/multiple front-ends, debugger) and Hazel (direct structure editing).