> In the prose document, I would like to be able to tag the gas production per mole, molar mass, density, activation temperature, and material compatibility in such a way that I can render a table of the candidate materials in the document itself, and then sort it by gas production per mass, per volume, or per dollar, and filter it by activation temperature.

Yes, that seems be a very direct application of my wit concept, with one wit for each magnitude, placing each wit as a column of the table and having one row for each material. In the end, a wit is basically like a user-friendly version of a typed pointer in C, with a 'visual' GUI for combining them like an Excel pivot table or a OLAP 'data cube'. You can read the value at the end, or you can iterate it over a collection to process a list of values; the meaning is located in the code that uses it, more than in the object itself, and you can share the reference to the same value in many different places.

Of course there are already several systems where you can define a data structure in code and show it rendered as labels on a document (see idyll[1], or the original Explorable Explanations), but I have the idea that using such system shouldn't require any code for basic or moderately-complex programs:

1) the user should be able to define the data structure through direct interaction, like on a spreadsheet (e.g. Airtable does this fairly well). But the raw data could be extracted from existing documents, like a web scrapper, with the scrapping expressions defined through point-and-click over the actual data. The now extict kimonolabs[2] had a good interaction model for this part. **

2) this structured data could be transferred between applications with a copy/paste-like universal protocol (most current applications require coding against APIs for this),

3) calculations can be defined and re-applied to new data collections through simple formulas and more direct manipulation, possibly with Programming-by-example assistance tools. The people from MS Excel are doing this, but they lack the universal API - everything happens inside Microsoft applications.

For your example, you could store your database of atomic weights as "hidden wits" somewhere else, extract the desired value by naming the label (wit labels are global variables under a particular namespace), and feed its values to the expression where you want to calculate a function application with the data.

> The calculation part would be easy to do in Gnumeric or localc, but those handle the prose, units, and intervals very poorly at best; and they would be hopeless for the equation parsing part and, at best, clumsy for the database queries and Ellingham-diagram plotting.

The good thing of wits is that you could chain them and transfer information between applications, with each app handling what it does well, and returning the data back to the origin; i.e. any workflow that you could do manually with copy-paste. In this sense it's like a Unix pipe, but in a visual environment and transferring structured data (which can be de-composed at the receiving end, extracting one wit at a time). They are also like those awkward connector lines in dataflow visual languages, except that instead of a line you have a label with the wit name at the origin and destination.

Again MS has Power Automate as a tool with these capabilities (I think its way more complex and powerful than the classic Apple Automator), but again Power Automate restricts you to a closed runtime environment of applications that support it, which you glue only through code.

> Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of, or am I imagining wits very differently from what you really have in mind? I look forward to reading your notes! (I'm not in the Slack. I hate Slack. It's ransomware.)

I don't like walled gardens either; I've heard Matrix.org and Element.io are lovely this time of the year... :-P

I've bought the domain http://witclay.com, though I never managed to clean up my notes and publish them over there. If I manage to gather an audience in that group, I will probably summon the will to publish my use cases over there so that I can show them in the few next months, providing some concrete examples that are more intelligible than just abstract ideas.

[1] https://idyll-lang.org/docs

[2] https://youtu.be/RS3ckeDIOmE?t=157 Kimono on tables

https://youtu.be/jQ_hSNj1gI0?t=49 Kimono on structured text

** The wits here would be the yellow bubbles with the extracted data. Again, many of my insights I've seen realized in other systems; my idea is an orchestration of all them into a single user-centric system that made all them compatible, at the user fingertips.