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A New Medium for Communicating Research on Programming Languages

willcrichton.net/nota

Papers about programming languages involve complex notations, systems, and proofs. Static PDFs offer little support in understanding such concepts. I describe Nota, a framework for academic papers that uses the browser's interactive capabilities to support comprehension in context. Nota uses hover effects, tooltips, expandable sections, toggleable explanations, and other interactions to help readers understand a language's syntax and semantics. I demonstrate the use of Nota by rewriting a PL paper using its primitives, and also by writing this paper in Nota.