As I’m working on Roundabout and learning Go, new possibilities for Carrot keep springing into my mind. This is refreshing and relaxing, because for a long time I was concerned (it might be fair to say “obsessed”) with convincing myself that I was not simply, pointlessly reinventing the wheel — which is to say that I was simply reimplementing TeX with different markup characters. Eventually I quit caring about this.

These days I’m starting to see applications for Carrot-the-engine all over the place. Much as Emacs is a Lisp engine with an editor wrapped around it by default, Carrot will be a system for turning semi-structured text into structured data and manipulating it. So at the worst, I’ll be reimplementing TeX and XML and their respective toolchains :)

Anyway, I’m starting to see uses in the markup domain for things other than documents, like photo gallery generation (because I think I’m starting to swing back from “just let online services handle everything”), and serialization (it occurred to me that I could represent the thesaurus corpus as a Carrot document, both inside the machine for doing ops on it and outside the machine as a release format other than SQLite dump).

And this is without getting into the effects of the slightly-longer-range plans for a Carrot implementation which is more of a compiler-as-a-service, acting as a backend to other apps.

So yeah. Good stuff ahead.