Practal has its first monthly sponsor, many thanks to purebounce! 🎉

A First Look At Practal: A First Release of Practal as a Visual Studio Code Extension is out!

For background information on Practal and its vision, please also check out practal.com.

Currently, only me is working on Practal. Hopefully that will change in 2023! Before that can happen, I first need to firmly establish the roots of the project. Early research prototypes have been implemented in Swift, but in order to make Practal as widely available as possible, all development has been shifted to TypeScript.

Much is planned for 2023, illustrated in the following graphic:

The graphic shows three planned, highly interdependent products: a cloud app, a Visual Studio Code extension, and a programming language.

Let's see what each of these products is about in a bit more detail.

The Practal.com cloud app is the long-term and ultimate goal. Its purpose is to be a bicycle for your mathematical mind.

If that sounds too vague for you, imagine instead something of a fusion of interactive theorem proving systems like Isabelle, with systems like SageMath, word processing technologies inspired by LaTeX, Markdown and Obsidian, and AI capabilities inspired by systems such as ChatGPT.

While there is no way that Practal can be fully realized in 2023, a first version is planned for not later than this September.

Practal Core will be an open-source implementation of Practal's core functionality. It implements core concepts of Practal such as Abstraction Algebra and Abstraction Logic. Besides functioning as a library which you can import into your own projects, it is also a Visual Studio Code extension. Practal Core enables you to make use of all artefacts created with Practal wherever and however you want to.

An experimental early release of Practal Core is available.

If Abstraction Logic is the best logic possible, would not a programming language based on it be the best programming language possible? Practalium is a project to find this out! If successful, Practalium code will make its way into building Practal alongside TypeScript.

The Practal.com cloud app will be published under a Freemium business model based on subscriptions. The hope is that this enables sustained development and availability of resources, such that Practal can eventually become everyday infrastructure.

To ensure that this infrastructure can be used without worrying about lock-in, core components of Practal are published as open-source projects. Please consider sponsoring them!