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Since the dawn of time people have been asking about command chaining in Ubiquity. If you have a translate command and an email command, it would be great to be able to, for example, translate hello to Spanish and email to Juanito. This is what we call command chaining or piping: in a single complex query, specifying multiple (probably two) actions and using the first’s output as the second’s input.¹

Today I hope to cover some of the technical considerations required in implementing command chaining in Ubiquity, and I will follow up soon with a blog post on the linguistic considerations required as well.

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There are two challenges to implementing so-called command chaining, but only one of them is choosing a linguistically appropriate structural standard and parsing it. The other is the underlying difficulty of processing each individual “clause” in sequence, asynchronously. Alex Fritze blogged about how a project like his own Oni could dramatically simplify this underlying process.

Ubiquity, Oni, and Composability:

but I cannot instruct it to give me list of translated google results:

translate (google foo) to German  // doesn't work

Or email me the resulting list:

email(translate (google foo) to German) // doesn't work

…So how does Oni relate to this? Oni is a browser-based “embedded structured concurrency framework”. It allows you to write asynchronous code as if it was synchronous, adding back the kind-of composibility that is lost when juggling concurrent strands of execution (such as e.g. pending XMLHttpRequests) with ‘conventional’ sequential languages.