Overview

I've spent a fair bit of time over the last several years iterating on a text-based probability distribution editor (the 5 to 10 input editor in Guesstimate and Foretold). Recently I've added some programming language functionality to it, and have decided to refocus it as a domain-specific language.

The language is currently called Squiggle. Squiggle is made for expressing distributions and functions that return distributions. I hope that it can be used one day for submitting complex predictions on Foretold and other platforms.

Right now Squiggle is very much a research endeavor. I'm making significant sacrifices for stability and deployment in order to test out exciting possible features. If it were being developed in a tech company, it would be in the "research" or "labs" division.

You can mess with the current version of Squiggle here. Consider it in pre-alpha stage. If you do try it out, please do contact me with questions and concerns. It is still fairly buggy and undocumented.

I expect to spend a lot of time on Squiggle in the next several months or years. I'm curious to get feedback from the community. In the short term I'd like to get high-level feedback, in the longer term I'd appreciate user testing. If you have thoughts or would care to just have a call and chat, please reach out! We (The Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute) have some funding now, so I'm also interested in contractors or hires if someone is a really great fit.

Squiggle was previously introduced in a short talk that was transcribed here, and Nuño Sempere wrote a post about using it here.

Note: the code for this has developed since my time on Guesstimate. With Guesstimate, I had one cofounder, Matthew McDermott. During the last two years, I've had a lot of help from a handful of programmers and enthusiasts. Many thanks to Sebastian Kosch and Nuño Sempere, who both contributed. I'll refer to this vague collective as "we" throughout this post.

Video Demo

A Quick Tour

The syntax is forked from Guesstimate and Foretold.

A simple normal distribution

normal(5,2)

You may notice that unlike Guesstimate, the distribution is nearly perfectly smooth. It's this way because it doesn't use sampling for (many) functions where it doesn't need to.

Lognormal shorthand

5 to 10

This results in a lognormal distribution with 5 to 10 being the 5th and 95th confidence intervals respe...

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