rep_lang

What is rep_lang and what is it for?

rep_lang is a programming language for writing down what a community values, in a form software can read and compute over. It exists so that a group can state its own cultural norms and reputation in its own words instead of having them fixed by whoever built the platform.

rep_lang is a programming language for writing down what a community values. Its own description calls it a language for Cultural Articulation: a notation for stating cultural norms, signals and standings in a form software can read, rather than leaving them as prose. Neighbourhoods' documentation for its Sacred Capital work describes a formal language for cultural articulation as part of a Reputation Vault, with the first implementation built on Holochain.

The idea is that a group should be able to describe its own culture in language precise enough to compute with — what counts as a contribution, what a member's standing means in this particular context — rather than accepting definitions fixed by whoever built the platform. rep_lang is the language layer for that. A built version is an interpreter: it reads statements written in the language and evaluates them.

The most concrete worked example is a neighbouring repository in the same organisation, social_sensemaker, which its maintainers describe as an integration of rep_lang and Holochain. Its README walks through running two Holochain conductors alongside two rep_lang processes and watching an entry created in one appear in the other. Building and running rep_lang itself is documented in the repository README, which covers the Nix shell, the rli interpreter and the rle file runner.

From 3 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.