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+---
+layout: "../../layouts/BlogLayout.astro"
+title: "An introduction to BABLR"
+author: "Stirling Hostetter"
+date: "10/31/2024"
+draft: false
+---
+
+# The first of many...
+
+This is the first in what we hope will be a series of status updates intended to
+provide the most recent updates surrounding the development of BABLR.
+
+To catch you up on what has happened so far, BABLR started development in 2020
+as `cst-tokens`, intended as a successor to `recast`. Since then the scope of
+the project has grown considerably, and it now aims to be a new fully featured
+IDE, built from the ground up. Its development has also progress steadily over
+the last four years, with Conrad (aka conartist6) working on the project full
+time.
+
+My name is Stirling (aka stirlhoss) and I have been following the project for 2
+and half years now. Together Conrad and I founded Silphium Labs with the goal of
+developing the BABLR technology and use it to bring programming literacy to a
+majority of the general population. For the past three months I’ve been working
+part time, but as of tomorrow I will be working full time for Silphium:
+developing the core BABLR technology, doing community outreach, and building out
+this website.
+
+## Here are some of the major accomplishments we’ve had so far:
+
+- Bootstrapped the BABLR VM: a system for defining LR parsers that are
+  implemented in terms of itself.
+- Implemented regex parsing over streaming inputs
+- Built an efficient representation for asynchronous input streams
+
+## Here is a list of some of the things we’ve accomplished recently:
+
+- Numerous changes and improvements to CSTML, the core markup language that
+  powers BABLR
+- Built a prototype of Paneditor, our browser-based drag and drop visual code
+  editor
+- Released a new stable version of BABLR
+- Released a Deno version of our CLI
+- Implemented template tag interpolation rigorously
+- Implemented a prototype of the Spamex pattern matching language
+- Defined `$` flag as a way of defining templates
+- Set a tentative date for an alpha release on or around November 18th
+
+## Some goals we hope to reach next month include:
+
+- Launch an interactive playground on the website
+- Add the ability to use nested (JSON-structured) attributes in CSTML
+- Implement drag and drop end to end for the first time in Paneditor
+
+Right now this website is mostly stubbed out pages and layouts, but we are
+hoping to rapidly expand its content as we race closer and closer to having a
+production-ready product. Eventually this will be a place you can find
+tutorials on building grammars, docs on how to make use of all of BABLR's rich
+features, and informative blog posts detailing the engineering work that goes
+into making it all a reality.
+
+If you would like to contribute to the building of the website or any part of
+BABLR, feel free to hop into our [Discord](https://discord.gg/pTbg4JGEZp). There
+is no shortage of work that needs doing and we have tasks at a wide array of
+skill levels. Any and all help is welcome!