Show HN: Contacts: A Microlang for Managing Contacts

For ideas, personally I manage my contacts in two separate entities because I still have to find a way to merge two different worlds:

- on desktop my contacts are org-mode notes, in contacts terms I use them just for email completion in notmuch (my mail client) but the contacts notes contains much more, clickable links to some relevant conversations, TODOs digested also by org-agenda etc etc etc a simple pure text feature-rich CRM;

- on mobile https://github.com/tchapi/davis on my home server and DavX⁵ on Android, I have no integrations and well, I still do not need it much except to add new contacts or delete them in a single place for both.

The above description to state a thing: the BIG issue with all modern software and in part unix classic one is integration. In Emacs anything is integrated so there are not much boundaries between functionalities as we have not much boundaries between things in our mind, while on modern systems at maximum we can copypaste or drag&drop and in Unix we can combine but every time we need to mangle text since there is no common language for anything, what we use is the shell, not "the system" witch is written in a separate compiled language. We can't circumvent this limit with all modern systems. That's is.

So despite the idea of simply storing contacts with a tool that allow easy export in various format might be effective in some cases we will anyway hit an integration wall sooner or later, let's say another app who need another kind of export and so on and the simple language became more complex while still remain unable to add anything else on top/related to contacts details do to "app separation" bound to the system design. It's a nice effort, and I thank the author for sharing the code, it might be helpful for some only we need a different software architecture to really manage our digital life, one we abandoned decades ago, the concept of an OS as a single application/framework where anything is runtime editable code, user-programmable, a single language, so we can just access functionalities via common data structure and functions instead of the integration hell we know very well.

Obvious question: how does it relate to vCard, which is the standard way of describing contacts? The examples shown are too simplistic for real world use: how do I specify multiple phones/emails, like work and personal?

And a nitpick: it cannot be both "open source and public domain" -- open source means it's licensed under an Open Source license, while public domain means that there are no IP rights.

i think this is lovely … one idea would be to build a raku Grammar for your language (which would be also ~23 lines I suppose) … that way you could make raku Contact objects and easily add international variations. also you could write an export (ie print) method to output from Contacts to your language. disclaimer : I wrote the raku Contact module https://raku.land/zef:librasteve/Contact and would be happy to help.

https://docs.raku.org/language/grammars