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Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

186 points by Naeron 10y ago

relics443 10y ago
From what I understand after watching true video, I think this abstraction could work for extremely simple implementation details, but once the implementation gets even slightly complex, the scale of complexity of coding it with this system balloons.
- Thrillington 10y ago
  That's the exact problem I encountered when I worked on a similar product for microcontrollers. Having to use a mouse to interact with your programming ide graphically doesn't scale. It does make for a decent tool for hobby projects or prototyping though.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  Yeah then you have Labview, and nobody wants that.
swalsh 10y ago
That auto full screen thing is infuriating.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Just came here to say the same thing, sounds interesting but I bounced soon as I couldn't view outside of fullscreen.
  - haskman 10y ago
    Agreed, that was very strange. Right click "Copy video link". Leads me to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy5m091fOTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy5m091fOTU
    - Naeron 10y ago
      As a quick fix, I've put there a direct link to that video.
      - wingerlang 10y ago
        I think you should just turn off the forced full screen. No reason to have it at all.
- Naeron 10y ago
  I'm on it!
triptych 10y ago
The misspelled purpose.
- Naeron 10y ago
  fixed, the old one is still cached though
godmodus 10y ago
Cute idea. Why No Linux?
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Maybe because GNU/Linux users are allergic to money for desktop software.
  - AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
    Not a very mature comment for HN, this kind of shit posting is really below what I have come to expect from this community. That said, it maybe enlightening to the OP to answer with some kind of effort and truthfulness. The game development industry is highly compartmentalized with respect to tooling, platforms, IDEs, etc. It's mostly proprietary software that still runs the game. These antiquated models of software development run contrary to the core of GNU/Linux's philosophy, and therefore pose significant challenges to the developers to make their "unique" idea work on this OS. Not to fear, however. The latest advancements in the game development space do point to a more inclusive, holistic, and platform-independent means for software development. The indies have enthusiastically embraced these new developments.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Just recently we had the author of Octave, thinking about giving up development, because of exactly this problem, so excuse me if you don't think my remark was mature enough. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 Do you at least pay for the distribution you use? I do.
      - AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
        Your comment attacked an entire user base, their collective crime being that they don't share your particular (weak) moral values about the distribution of software intended for use on the Linux desktop. Worst of all, you now insinuate that a problem suffered by one author of one application that is used on the GNU/Linux desktop is a problem for all. Not everybody can "pay for" (support monetarily) free software. I personally don't see why it is any of your damn business what I do and do not "pay" for. My distribution does not make a huge deal over asking for donations but I do support them both monetarily and otherwise. Frankly, I think the 'other' ways that I support the free software movement are more valuable than whatever money I can chuck at a guy whose program I like. Plenty of free software developers and maintainers would agree with your line of reasoning, which is part of the beauty of free software. But few of those people would argue that yours is a decent reason to attack their entire user base.
alunaryak 10y ago
I like the idea of a physical analog to game logic, e.g. tripping a certain condition based on collision mechanics. This could be useful for something akin to Game Maker, and I'd be curious to see how it would translate to other mediums. I could imagine front end programming would be well suited for this style, especially when creating interactive prototypes.
- Naeron 10y ago
  Yes, those would work too.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
vashington 10y ago
The video was trying to do two things at once: explain the goals and high level ideas as well as demonstrate "syntax" (the clicks and drag and drops). Since these are both new to people coming to your site, it's hard to digest at the same time. I'd love a video of just explaining what the demo is doing, since I didn't really understand how to program in the new approach you described.
- Naeron 10y ago
  The exact method is not that important but the goal itself. But of course, you have a point. The explanation is planned but had no time for it yet.
petterfaiknavn 10y ago
Looks very similar to blueprints in UE4, with more visual integration of what actually happens.
- Naeron 10y ago
  Actually, that presents the code in a visual way while this allows you to work on the thing itself. Similar to Stop Drawing Dead Fish by Bret Victor: https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205
TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
Some feedback on the website: IMO, it's obnoxious and disrespectful to play full screen video like you're doing. That just made me close it immediately and leave after reading through the text. Considering the complexity involved in developing a an advanced IDE or similar, have you considered publishing an open source community version? Similar to JetBrain with IntelliJ. They seem to be doing great. Since we're on the subject of experimental UI concepts, I'll plug Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle [0] talk. For me it was an instant classic. [0] https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366
- Naeron 10y ago
  Actually more like Stop Drawing Dead Fish by Bret Victor: https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205 He is my hero actually :)
- Naeron 10y ago
  There is an alternative non-fullscreen link available but Amazon CloudFront cache hasn't been updated yet.
  - shadowmint 10y ago
    It's just a youtube video: https://youtu.be/Gy5m091fOTU https://youtu.be/Gy5m091fOTU
- IshKebab 10y ago
  I actually disagree about the fullscreen video. Why would I ever want to watch video not fullscreen? Vimeo also behaves like this on mobile and it's far superior to Youtube, which often totally hides the fullscreen button.
  - fnord123 10y ago
    >Why would I ever want to watch video not fullscreen? Because you're doing other stuff while listening to the audio. >Youtube, which often totally hides the fullscreen button. It's in the bottom right.
Naeron 10y ago
Fullscreen issue has been fixed but the old version of the website is still cached.
jdiez17 10y ago
This seems quite similar to LabView. So I imagine it'll have similar pros and cons: LabView is great for putting together quick prototypes for e.g data collection or visualization, but it quickly becomes unmanageable as the complexity increases; you need to 'tidy up' the placement of the various operators or it ends up being a rat's nest.
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  No, they explain that LabVIEW and other visual languages are just different ways of representing the code. The idea here, I think, is that there's far greater coupling between the output of the program and the program itself. It's similar to some of Bret Victor's ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII I'd like to incorporate this coupling idea into my own visual dataflow language (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html), but haven't yet decided how to implement it. My approach has been to design the language from the bottom-up, so that simple programs can be simply drawn, and there are higher level programming constructs which simplify more complex code, avoiding the complexity problem (the Deutsch limit) you've seen with LabVIEW.
- datenwolf 10y ago
  If it were "only" for the spatial relationship between "variables" and logic, LabVIEW wouldn't be such a pain to use. What's really annoying about LabVIEW is, that its programming paradigm is kind-of functional, but it doesn't go the full effort and forces you to do things, which one kind of expects are abstracted away, and things become a mess. Let me explain my top pet peeve: In LabVIEW the main concept are so called VIs: Virtual Instruments. A VI consists of a number of inputs called "Controls", some logic in between and outputs called "Indicators". Inside a VI you have the full range of programming primitives like loops (which interestingly enough can also work like list comprehensions through automatic indexing, but I digress) "variables" (in the form of data flow wires) but no functions. VIs are what you use as function. And if everything happens through VI inputs and outputs and you don't use global variables, feedback nodes or similar impure stuff it's pretty much functional. Somewhere your program has to start, i.e. there must be some kind of "main" VI. But VIs mostly behave like functions, so if you hit "run" for the main VI it will just follow its data flow until every input has reached what it's wired to and all subVI instances have executed and thats it. That's perfect for a single shot program, like you'd have on the command line or executing to serve a HTTP request, however it's kind of the opposite of what you want for an interactive program that has a visual UI. Sure there is that "run continuously" mode which will just loop VI execution. But all what it does is re-evaluate and execute each and every input and subVI again and again and again. If you're using LabVIEW in a laboratory setting, which is its main use, you probably have some sensors, actuators or even stuff like lasers controlled by this. And then you do not want to have then execute whatever command again and again. There is a solution to this of course, which are called "event structures". Essentially its like a large "switch" statement, that will dispatch exactly once for one event. Of course this caters only toward input manipulation events and some application execution state events. And you can not use it in "run continuously" mode without invoking all the other caveats. So what you do is, you place it in a while loop. How do you stop the while loop? Eh, splat a "STOP" button somewhere on the Front Panel (and don't forget to add a "Value Changed" event handler for the stop button, otherwise you'll click STOP without effect until you manipulate something else). And then in the Event structure you have to meticulously wire all the data flows not touched by whatever the event does through so called "shift registers" in the while loop to keep the values around. If you forget or miswire one data flow you have a bug. What seriously annoys me about that is, that in principle the whole dataflow paradigm of LabVIEW would allow for immediate implementation of FRP (functional reactive programming): re-evaluation and execution of only those parts of the program that are affected by the change. The other thing that seriously annoys me is how poorly polymorphism is implemented in LabVIEW and how limited dynamic typing is. I'd not even go as far as saying that LabVIEW does type inference, although at least for primitive types it covers a surprisingly large set of use cases. Connect numeric type arrays to an arithmetic operation and it does it element wise. Connect a single element numeric type and an array and it again does things element wise. Have an all numeric cluster (LabVIEW equivalent of a struct) and you can do element wise operations just as well. So if we were to look at this like Haskell there's a certain type class to which numeric element arrays, clusters and single elements belong and it's actually great and a huge workload saver! Unfortunately you can't expose that on the inputs/outputs of a VI. VI inputs/outputs always have to be of a specific type. Oh yes, there are variants, but they're about as foolproof to use as `void*` in C/C++. So the proper way to implement polymorphism in LabVIEW is to manually create variants of your VI for each and every combination of types you'd like to input and coalesce them in a polymorphic VI. And since you have to do it with the mouse and VIs are stored in binary this is not something you can easily script away. Gaaahhh…
pttrsmrt 10y ago
Like so many projects on the internet: Lots of big words and ideas, but no content. Show us some actual tech and code and I might throw my money your way. Or better: Release your code under an open license and I might even throw my time your way!
- Naeron 10y ago
  I need the money to develop it fully. If it was usable at this point, I would release it, no doubt. I want something out of the door ASAP, that's why it is focusing on 2D games first. That is feasible but still hard. This is really not a technology in the traditional sense. The runtime itself is nothing new. The real thing is the UX, that is how programming can be made more efficient to do. I believe if someone supports this, he/she supports the goal of this project, not the concrete implementation.
  - MattRix 10y ago
    I love the idea of it... but the video makes it very hard to see how it works. I believe it's possible to show how this works without it actually working right now. I think you might be focusing too much on making it look good and polished, you need to just make it work, bare bones!
    - dkersten 10y ago
      I believe it's possible to show how this works without it actually working right now. Exactly! A short tutorial using screenshots to explain what stuff means, for example, would go a long way and doesn't actually require anything to be implemented as the screenshots could be mocked up.
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Looks interesting. I would like a more detailed look at the visual language being used here. How is logic projected out into the physical world, is it simply making variables into nodes?
Vandash 10y ago
Very promising, the site doesn't talk about Unity 3D, did you consider building a plugin for it?
- Naeron 10y ago
  No, I haven't considered it yet. To be frank, my plate is full right now.
revelation 10y ago
So they've reinvented Matlab Simulink or LabVIEW with a dorky interface and .5% of the functionality.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  I feel like 90% of the problem with Labview is the interface, so I wouldn't discount interface improvements. Even if this wasn't spaghetti code, most of the Labview icons are totally unreadable: http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm912163998723206173.jpg http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm91216399872...
- veli_joza 10y ago
  Simulink and LabVIEW to DeepUI can be compared to what C is to Lisp. Simulink and LabVIEW are made for electrical engineers transitioning to developers. They are good tools for building and shipping products. DeepUI on the other hand introduces new paradigm for visual expression, and it looks to be more targeted towards computer scientists and experimental artists (and maybe hobby game developers with aversion to traditional programming). I agree that in all these visual programming languages the interface is always way too slow. They tend to completely ignore the keyboard which is by far the fastest input device.
dmvaldman 10y ago
There is a deeper question undercutting this project (and Bret Victor's Drawing Dead Fish talk and related approaches). That question is: how can we represent computation in an intuitive and scalable way? Conventional programming languages is one answer. They associate programs with text. Some believe there is another way, by associating programs with diagrams. A more abstract example: machine learning associates programs with parameters and weights. In some weird way, I feel these are all skeuomorphisms. We choose text because that's how we comprehend literature. We choose diagrams because we are visual. We choose ML because we mimic how our brains work. We don't, however, try to understand what "thought" is, and work backwards to form a representation of it. For example, take thinking of programming textually. Text assumes a beginning, an end, and an ordered sequence between them. But in this small programming example, is there a well-defined ordering? a = 0; b = 1; c = a + b; Since the first and second lines can be switched, in some sense Text itself does not do Thought justice. Visual representations like the one in this video also have their shortcomings. The most obvious being, a monitor is 2D. Thought is not 2D. Going to 3D won't help either. Thought also not only spatial and temporal. For example, how would you represent concatenating strings visually? I think the more interesting question is how we can accurately represent thought?
- Naeron 10y ago
  String example: if you have "foo" and "bar", both are a list of characters. Now, "bar" has a beginning represented by a handle and you drag that handle to the end of "foo". Very briefly something like that. Of course, not everything is set in stone and we need to try multiple approaches to see which one is the fastest.
- dustingetz 10y ago
  > is there a well-defined ordering? > a = 0; b = 1; c = a + b; In pure functional languages, these expressions form a dependency graph and the interpreter or compiler may choose an ordering and may cache intermediate results We may even represent the program itself as a graph, just like you suggest with ML programs, but this is a general purpose program Obviously we can't do this in imperative languages. I think pure functional programming enables this future of thinking about programs as graphs and not as text.
ungzd 10y ago
A mashup of flowcharts and FRP with Hollywood aesthetics?
- Naeron 10y ago
  FRP seems about right and I wanted it to look cool :). But no flowcharts, those represent steps. If you are talking about the logical symbols, they are not step based at all. Rather more similar to physically implemented logical circuits.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Is it just me? Or does this look 10 times geekier than writing actual code? I think the project is trying to be a user friendly way of writing programs, and I think that's an awesome idea, but the actual product looks otherwise. I finished the video and still have no idea what the hell was going on through out the entire video.
- Naeron 10y ago
  There is a plan for a lengthier explanation video. The intention of the video was to show that it can be done. Of course, some kind of explanation and training is needed for everything, I don't dispute that.
  - dkersten 10y ago
    My problem with the video is that it doesn't show me what can be done. It shows me that the ball can follow the line and with some magical symbols and lines "other logic" can be "somehow" added. It didn't do anything to tell me what other logic is possible, nor did it explain what the symbols and lines mean. So I still don't really know _what_ can be done (besides a pong game) and I've no idea what most of the on screen stuff even is or means.
- StreamBright 10y ago
  Same here, the video is way too long without giving actual information I was looking for. I guess they should create two videos, one for programmers and one for everybody else.
- zython 10y ago
  I think they pursue a similar approach to programming or implementing programming logic as DRAKON. If you believe their website it has been used in the Russian Space Program. But I have to agree with you, this DeepUI looks a PITA to work with in comparison to DRAKON. http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/ http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/
  - DonaldFisk 10y ago
UhUhUhUh 10y ago
Is it a sort of Wolfram's approach? Candidly asking.
aylmao 10y ago
Can't watch the video right now. Anyone can summarize it? What is this / how does it work (from a user standpoint)? (Pro-tip for the site; screenshots and concrete descriptions on how things work)
cafebabbe 10y ago
There is this old idea that programs are somehow "limited" by their textual representation, and that a 2D graphical syntax would unleash more possibilities. Never worked very well so far, unfortunately, except for a bunch of very specific niches.
- ipnon 10y ago
  Isn't this just UML for a generation that wasn't programming during Dot Com?
delegate 10y ago
I like it and I think this is the general direction that creating applications will look like in the future. But don't throw away text-based programming yet; the wiser move would be to combine the two. Find use-cases were visual DeepUI style programming shines and is vastly superior to text-based programming, but let me polish the details with old-school text source code. There are apps which already do a lot of this, for example Unity - you can assemble your scenes and animations visually and tune it up with code.
marknadal 10y ago
I worked on Accelsor which is a tactile-spatial programming language, and I think the ideas here are actually really good (so don't let HN haters get you down). Ultimately work like this though leads to needing to reinvent all of programming (unfortunately) for instance, I'm now having to build a graph database to handle Turing Complete systems that are being collaborated on in realtime (see http://gun.js.org http://gun.js.org). So prepare for a long haul of work ahead of you. Get to know people in the space, like me and the Eve team, etc. If you persist long enough (don't let money or lack of money stop you) you'll make a dent. :)
- Naeron 10y ago
  I still have to eat though :)
asow92 10y ago
Good luck.
big_paps 10y ago
Looks like completely detached from reality. Its like a digital revival of electronics ?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
org3432 10y ago
I watched the video but have no idea what I'm looking at, it's supposed to be a pong game of some sort?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
buzzybee 10y ago
As soon as I saw a logic gate implemented for a single keypress I was "noping" out of there. Visual methods, to a one, break down quickly when they reproduce low-level digital logic. At that point, you have a software circuit board, and this is a thing that your CPU can represent just fine by coding in assembly and possibly adding an abstraction on top for a dataflow representation. Graphics are absolutely wonderful, in contrast, when they are able to stick to a domain abstraction, which is why we have a notion of application software at all. I have, in fact, aimed towards discovering what a "Pong synthesizer" would look like, so I have the domain knowledge to know that it does tend to lead to the digital logic breakdown if you aim to surface every possibility as a configurable patch point. As a result I started looking more deeply into software modularity ideas and rediscovered hierarchical structures(Unix, IP addressing, etc.) as the model to follow. I'm gradually incorporating those ideas into a functioning game engine, i.e. I'm shipping the game first and building the engine as I find time, and I do have designs for making a higher level editor of this sort at some point. However, I also intend to have obvious cutoff points. There are certain things that are powerful about visual systems, but pressuring them to expose everything at the top level is more obscuring than illuminating. So my strategy is to instead have editors that compile down to the formats of the modular lower-level system, smoothing the "ladder of abstraction" and allowing people to work at the abstraction level that suits them.
- johnp_ 10y ago
  The logic gate's primary function seemed to be in limiting the paddle to not move outside of the playing field. Otoh, in a visual programming language it'd feel more natural to make the upper and lower edges of the playing field collidable (I'm sure there's a better word for that), so that moving the paddle is inherently limited by collision with the edges.
blueprint 10y ago
This looks like a complete scam.
- Naeron 10y ago
  Why do you say that?
  - azeirah 10y ago
    To be fair, your site looks like one of those weird overly ambitious overpromising products like * http://madmaniak.github.io/pro/ http://madmaniak.github.io/pro/ * https://thegrid.io/ https://thegrid.io/ (seems like their site is having some difficulties) Before yours, there have been many products that promise to enable programming for everyone, many of these have been scams, utter failures or were just overly marketed mediocre software packages. The things is, the way your video seems voiced to "sell" rather than "explain" what is going on, as well as the odd, or at least "unique" hacker aesthetic of the website makes it look very dubious. I have no idea how to showcase a product like this the "right" way, maybe there is no "right" way, but I can certainly say that the aesthetic, big claims, confusing video and ambitious future plans give the project a bad smell.
dkersten 10y ago
I found the video quite confusing. It seems like its great for things that have an on-screen spatial meaning like the pong example game[1]. But what if I want to represent something abstract? Like a tree (lets say a quad-tree since this is for (2d?) games for now)? Or what if I want to implement AI logic (lets say I want some kind of decision-tree planner and path finding)? I'm having trouble visualising (I guess because the video didn't really go to explain) how any of this can be done, as opposed to "moving something around on the screen". I assume this has been thought about. I just couldn't figure out any of the details from the video. [1] although even in that case, I couldn't figure out what the symbols and lines in the video meant. The symbols especially seem cryptic. A mix between logic gates and something else?
Naeron 10y ago
Many people did not understand the video so I am going to create a detailed explanation.

186 points by Naeron 10y ago

From what I understand after watching true video, I think this abstraction could work for extremely simple implementation details, but once the implementation gets even slightly complex, the scale of complexity of coding it with this system balloons.

Thrillington 10y ago
That's the exact problem I encountered when I worked on a similar product for microcontrollers. Having to use a mouse to interact with your programming ide graphically doesn't scale. It does make for a decent tool for hobby projects or prototyping though.
IshKebab 10y ago
Yeah then you have Labview, and nobody wants that.

swalsh 10y ago

That auto full screen thing is infuriating.

vvanders 10y ago
Just came here to say the same thing, sounds interesting but I bounced soon as I couldn't view outside of fullscreen.
- haskman 10y ago
  Agreed, that was very strange. Right click "Copy video link". Leads me to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy5m091fOTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy5m091fOTU
  - Naeron 10y ago
    As a quick fix, I've put there a direct link to that video.
    - wingerlang 10y ago
      I think you should just turn off the forced full screen. No reason to have it at all.
Naeron 10y ago
I'm on it!

triptych 10y ago

The misspelled purpose.

Naeron 10y ago
fixed, the old one is still cached though

godmodus 10y ago

Cute idea. Why No Linux?

pjmlp 10y ago
Maybe because GNU/Linux users are allergic to money for desktop software.
- AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
  Not a very mature comment for HN, this kind of shit posting is really below what I have come to expect from this community. That said, it maybe enlightening to the OP to answer with some kind of effort and truthfulness. The game development industry is highly compartmentalized with respect to tooling, platforms, IDEs, etc. It's mostly proprietary software that still runs the game. These antiquated models of software development run contrary to the core of GNU/Linux's philosophy, and therefore pose significant challenges to the developers to make their "unique" idea work on this OS. Not to fear, however. The latest advancements in the game development space do point to a more inclusive, holistic, and platform-independent means for software development. The indies have enthusiastically embraced these new developments.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Just recently we had the author of Octave, thinking about giving up development, because of exactly this problem, so excuse me if you don't think my remark was mature enough. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575 Do you at least pay for the distribution you use? I do.
    - AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
      Your comment attacked an entire user base, their collective crime being that they don't share your particular (weak) moral values about the distribution of software intended for use on the Linux desktop. Worst of all, you now insinuate that a problem suffered by one author of one application that is used on the GNU/Linux desktop is a problem for all. Not everybody can "pay for" (support monetarily) free software. I personally don't see why it is any of your damn business what I do and do not "pay" for. My distribution does not make a huge deal over asking for donations but I do support them both monetarily and otherwise. Frankly, I think the 'other' ways that I support the free software movement are more valuable than whatever money I can chuck at a guy whose program I like. Plenty of free software developers and maintainers would agree with your line of reasoning, which is part of the beauty of free software. But few of those people would argue that yours is a decent reason to attack their entire user base.

alunaryak 10y ago

I like the idea of a physical analog to game logic, e.g. tripping a certain condition based on collision mechanics. This could be useful for something akin to Game Maker, and I'd be curious to see how it would translate to other mediums. I could imagine front end programming would be well suited for this style, especially when creating interactive prototypes.

Naeron 10y ago
Yes, those would work too.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

vashington 10y ago

The video was trying to do two things at once: explain the goals and high level ideas as well as demonstrate "syntax" (the clicks and drag and drops). Since these are both new to people coming to your site, it's hard to digest at the same time. I'd love a video of just explaining what the demo is doing, since I didn't really understand how to program in the new approach you described.

Naeron 10y ago
The exact method is not that important but the goal itself. But of course, you have a point. The explanation is planned but had no time for it yet.

petterfaiknavn 10y ago

Looks very similar to blueprints in UE4, with more visual integration of what actually happens.

Naeron 10y ago
Actually, that presents the code in a visual way while this allows you to work on the thing itself. Similar to Stop Drawing Dead Fish by Bret Victor: https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205

TheAceOfHearts 10y ago

Some feedback on the website: IMO, it's obnoxious and disrespectful to play full screen video like you're doing. That just made me close it immediately and leave after reading through the text. Considering the complexity involved in developing a an advanced IDE or similar, have you considered publishing an open source community version? Similar to JetBrain with IntelliJ. They seem to be doing great. Since we're on the subject of experimental UI concepts, I'll plug Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle [0] talk. For me it was an instant classic. [0] https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366

Naeron 10y ago
Actually more like Stop Drawing Dead Fish by Bret Victor: https://vimeo.com/64895205 https://vimeo.com/64895205 He is my hero actually :)
Naeron 10y ago
There is an alternative non-fullscreen link available but Amazon CloudFront cache hasn't been updated yet.
- shadowmint 10y ago
  It's just a youtube video: https://youtu.be/Gy5m091fOTU https://youtu.be/Gy5m091fOTU
IshKebab 10y ago
I actually disagree about the fullscreen video. Why would I ever want to watch video not fullscreen? Vimeo also behaves like this on mobile and it's far superior to Youtube, which often totally hides the fullscreen button.
- fnord123 10y ago
  >Why would I ever want to watch video not fullscreen? Because you're doing other stuff while listening to the audio. >Youtube, which often totally hides the fullscreen button. It's in the bottom right.

Naeron 10y ago

Fullscreen issue has been fixed but the old version of the website is still cached.

jdiez17 10y ago

This seems quite similar to LabView. So I imagine it'll have similar pros and cons: LabView is great for putting together quick prototypes for e.g data collection or visualization, but it quickly becomes unmanageable as the complexity increases; you need to 'tidy up' the placement of the various operators or it ends up being a rat's nest.

DonaldFisk 10y ago
No, they explain that LabVIEW and other visual languages are just different ways of representing the code. The idea here, I think, is that there's far greater coupling between the output of the program and the program itself. It's similar to some of Bret Victor's ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII I'd like to incorporate this coupling idea into my own visual dataflow language (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html), but haven't yet decided how to implement it. My approach has been to design the language from the bottom-up, so that simple programs can be simply drawn, and there are higher level programming constructs which simplify more complex code, avoiding the complexity problem (the Deutsch limit) you've seen with LabVIEW.
datenwolf 10y ago
If it were "only" for the spatial relationship between "variables" and logic, LabVIEW wouldn't be such a pain to use. What's really annoying about LabVIEW is, that its programming paradigm is kind-of functional, but it doesn't go the full effort and forces you to do things, which one kind of expects are abstracted away, and things become a mess. Let me explain my top pet peeve: In LabVIEW the main concept are so called VIs: Virtual Instruments. A VI consists of a number of inputs called "Controls", some logic in between and outputs called "Indicators". Inside a VI you have the full range of programming primitives like loops (which interestingly enough can also work like list comprehensions through automatic indexing, but I digress) "variables" (in the form of data flow wires) but no functions. VIs are what you use as function. And if everything happens through VI inputs and outputs and you don't use global variables, feedback nodes or similar impure stuff it's pretty much functional. Somewhere your program has to start, i.e. there must be some kind of "main" VI. But VIs mostly behave like functions, so if you hit "run" for the main VI it will just follow its data flow until every input has reached what it's wired to and all subVI instances have executed and thats it. That's perfect for a single shot program, like you'd have on the command line or executing to serve a HTTP request, however it's kind of the opposite of what you want for an interactive program that has a visual UI. Sure there is that "run continuously" mode which will just loop VI execution. But all what it does is re-evaluate and execute each and every input and subVI again and again and again. If you're using LabVIEW in a laboratory setting, which is its main use, you probably have some sensors, actuators or even stuff like lasers controlled by this. And then you do not want to have then execute whatever command again and again. There is a solution to this of course, which are called "event structures". Essentially its like a large "switch" statement, that will dispatch exactly once for one event. Of course this caters only toward input manipulation events and some application execution state events. And you can not use it in "run continuously" mode without invoking all the other caveats. So what you do is, you place it in a while loop. How do you stop the while loop? Eh, splat a "STOP" button somewhere on the Front Panel (and don't forget to add a "Value Changed" event handler for the stop button, otherwise you'll click STOP without effect until you manipulate something else). And then in the Event structure you have to meticulously wire all the data flows not touched by whatever the event does through so called "shift registers" in the while loop to keep the values around. If you forget or miswire one data flow you have a bug. What seriously annoys me about that is, that in principle the whole dataflow paradigm of LabVIEW would allow for immediate implementation of FRP (functional reactive programming): re-evaluation and execution of only those parts of the program that are affected by the change. The other thing that seriously annoys me is how poorly polymorphism is implemented in LabVIEW and how limited dynamic typing is. I'd not even go as far as saying that LabVIEW does type inference, although at least for primitive types it covers a surprisingly large set of use cases. Connect numeric type arrays to an arithmetic operation and it does it element wise. Connect a single element numeric type and an array and it again does things element wise. Have an all numeric cluster (LabVIEW equivalent of a struct) and you can do element wise operations just as well. So if we were to look at this like Haskell there's a certain type class to which numeric element arrays, clusters and single elements belong and it's actually great and a huge workload saver! Unfortunately you can't expose that on the inputs/outputs of a VI. VI inputs/outputs always have to be of a specific type. Oh yes, there are variants, but they're about as foolproof to use as `void*` in C/C++. So the proper way to implement polymorphism in LabVIEW is to manually create variants of your VI for each and every combination of types you'd like to input and coalesce them in a polymorphic VI. And since you have to do it with the mouse and VIs are stored in binary this is not something you can easily script away. Gaaahhh…

pttrsmrt 10y ago

Like so many projects on the internet: Lots of big words and ideas, but no content. Show us some actual tech and code and I might throw my money your way. Or better: Release your code under an open license and I might even throw my time your way!

Naeron 10y ago
I need the money to develop it fully. If it was usable at this point, I would release it, no doubt. I want something out of the door ASAP, that's why it is focusing on 2D games first. That is feasible but still hard. This is really not a technology in the traditional sense. The runtime itself is nothing new. The real thing is the UX, that is how programming can be made more efficient to do. I believe if someone supports this, he/she supports the goal of this project, not the concrete implementation.
- MattRix 10y ago
  I love the idea of it... but the video makes it very hard to see how it works. I believe it's possible to show how this works without it actually working right now. I think you might be focusing too much on making it look good and polished, you need to just make it work, bare bones!
  - dkersten 10y ago
    I believe it's possible to show how this works without it actually working right now. Exactly! A short tutorial using screenshots to explain what stuff means, for example, would go a long way and doesn't actually require anything to be implemented as the screenshots could be mocked up.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

Looks interesting. I would like a more detailed look at the visual language being used here. How is logic projected out into the physical world, is it simply making variables into nodes?

Vandash 10y ago

Very promising, the site doesn't talk about Unity 3D, did you consider building a plugin for it?

Naeron 10y ago
No, I haven't considered it yet. To be frank, my plate is full right now.

revelation 10y ago

So they've reinvented Matlab Simulink or LabVIEW with a dorky interface and .5% of the functionality.

IshKebab 10y ago
I feel like 90% of the problem with Labview is the interface, so I wouldn't discount interface improvements. Even if this wasn't spaghetti code, most of the Labview icons are totally unreadable: http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm912163998723206173.jpg http://www.ni.com/cms/images/devzone/pub/nrjsxmfm91216399872...
veli_joza 10y ago
Simulink and LabVIEW to DeepUI can be compared to what C is to Lisp. Simulink and LabVIEW are made for electrical engineers transitioning to developers. They are good tools for building and shipping products. DeepUI on the other hand introduces new paradigm for visual expression, and it looks to be more targeted towards computer scientists and experimental artists (and maybe hobby game developers with aversion to traditional programming). I agree that in all these visual programming languages the interface is always way too slow. They tend to completely ignore the keyboard which is by far the fastest input device.

dmvaldman 10y ago

There is a deeper question undercutting this project (and Bret Victor's Drawing Dead Fish talk and related approaches). That question is: how can we represent computation in an intuitive and scalable way? Conventional programming languages is one answer. They associate programs with text. Some believe there is another way, by associating programs with diagrams. A more abstract example: machine learning associates programs with parameters and weights. In some weird way, I feel these are all skeuomorphisms. We choose text because that's how we comprehend literature. We choose diagrams because we are visual. We choose ML because we mimic how our brains work. We don't, however, try to understand what "thought" is, and work backwards to form a representation of it. For example, take thinking of programming textually. Text assumes a beginning, an end, and an ordered sequence between them. But in this small programming example, is there a well-defined ordering? a = 0; b = 1; c = a + b; Since the first and second lines can be switched, in some sense Text itself does not do Thought justice. Visual representations like the one in this video also have their shortcomings. The most obvious being, a monitor is 2D. Thought is not 2D. Going to 3D won't help either. Thought also not only spatial and temporal. For example, how would you represent concatenating strings visually? I think the more interesting question is how we can accurately represent thought?

Naeron 10y ago
String example: if you have "foo" and "bar", both are a list of characters. Now, "bar" has a beginning represented by a handle and you drag that handle to the end of "foo". Very briefly something like that. Of course, not everything is set in stone and we need to try multiple approaches to see which one is the fastest.
dustingetz 10y ago
> is there a well-defined ordering? > a = 0; b = 1; c = a + b; In pure functional languages, these expressions form a dependency graph and the interpreter or compiler may choose an ordering and may cache intermediate results We may even represent the program itself as a graph, just like you suggest with ML programs, but this is a general purpose program Obviously we can't do this in imperative languages. I think pure functional programming enables this future of thinking about programs as graphs and not as text.

ungzd 10y ago

A mashup of flowcharts and FRP with Hollywood aesthetics?

Naeron 10y ago
FRP seems about right and I wanted it to look cool :). But no flowcharts, those represent steps. If you are talking about the logical symbols, they are not step based at all. Rather more similar to physically implemented logical circuits.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

Is it just me? Or does this look 10 times geekier than writing actual code? I think the project is trying to be a user friendly way of writing programs, and I think that's an awesome idea, but the actual product looks otherwise. I finished the video and still have no idea what the hell was going on through out the entire video.

Naeron 10y ago
There is a plan for a lengthier explanation video. The intention of the video was to show that it can be done. Of course, some kind of explanation and training is needed for everything, I don't dispute that.
- dkersten 10y ago
  My problem with the video is that it doesn't show me what can be done. It shows me that the ball can follow the line and with some magical symbols and lines "other logic" can be "somehow" added. It didn't do anything to tell me what other logic is possible, nor did it explain what the symbols and lines mean. So I still don't really know _what_ can be done (besides a pong game) and I've no idea what most of the on screen stuff even is or means.
StreamBright 10y ago
Same here, the video is way too long without giving actual information I was looking for. I guess they should create two videos, one for programmers and one for everybody else.
zython 10y ago
I think they pursue a similar approach to programming or implementing programming logic as DRAKON. If you believe their website it has been used in the Russian Space Program. But I have to agree with you, this DeepUI looks a PITA to work with in comparison to DRAKON. http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/ http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/
- DonaldFisk 10y ago

UhUhUhUh 10y ago

Is it a sort of Wolfram's approach? Candidly asking.

aylmao 10y ago

Can't watch the video right now. Anyone can summarize it? What is this / how does it work (from a user standpoint)? (Pro-tip for the site; screenshots and concrete descriptions on how things work)

cafebabbe 10y ago

There is this old idea that programs are somehow "limited" by their textual representation, and that a 2D graphical syntax would unleash more possibilities. Never worked very well so far, unfortunately, except for a bunch of very specific niches.

ipnon 10y ago
Isn't this just UML for a generation that wasn't programming during Dot Com?

delegate 10y ago

I like it and I think this is the general direction that creating applications will look like in the future. But don't throw away text-based programming yet; the wiser move would be to combine the two. Find use-cases were visual DeepUI style programming shines and is vastly superior to text-based programming, but let me polish the details with old-school text source code. There are apps which already do a lot of this, for example Unity - you can assemble your scenes and animations visually and tune it up with code.

marknadal 10y ago

I worked on Accelsor which is a tactile-spatial programming language, and I think the ideas here are actually really good (so don't let HN haters get you down). Ultimately work like this though leads to needing to reinvent all of programming (unfortunately) for instance, I'm now having to build a graph database to handle Turing Complete systems that are being collaborated on in realtime (see http://gun.js.org http://gun.js.org). So prepare for a long haul of work ahead of you. Get to know people in the space, like me and the Eve team, etc. If you persist long enough (don't let money or lack of money stop you) you'll make a dent. :)

Naeron 10y ago
I still have to eat though :)

asow92 10y ago

Good luck.

big_paps 10y ago

Looks like completely detached from reality. Its like a digital revival of electronics ?

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org3432 10y ago

I watched the video but have no idea what I'm looking at, it's supposed to be a pong game of some sort?

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buzzybee 10y ago

As soon as I saw a logic gate implemented for a single keypress I was "noping" out of there. Visual methods, to a one, break down quickly when they reproduce low-level digital logic. At that point, you have a software circuit board, and this is a thing that your CPU can represent just fine by coding in assembly and possibly adding an abstraction on top for a dataflow representation. Graphics are absolutely wonderful, in contrast, when they are able to stick to a domain abstraction, which is why we have a notion of application software at all. I have, in fact, aimed towards discovering what a "Pong synthesizer" would look like, so I have the domain knowledge to know that it does tend to lead to the digital logic breakdown if you aim to surface every possibility as a configurable patch point. As a result I started looking more deeply into software modularity ideas and rediscovered hierarchical structures(Unix, IP addressing, etc.) as the model to follow. I'm gradually incorporating those ideas into a functioning game engine, i.e. I'm shipping the game first and building the engine as I find time, and I do have designs for making a higher level editor of this sort at some point. However, I also intend to have obvious cutoff points. There are certain things that are powerful about visual systems, but pressuring them to expose everything at the top level is more obscuring than illuminating. So my strategy is to instead have editors that compile down to the formats of the modular lower-level system, smoothing the "ladder of abstraction" and allowing people to work at the abstraction level that suits them.

johnp_ 10y ago
The logic gate's primary function seemed to be in limiting the paddle to not move outside of the playing field. Otoh, in a visual programming language it'd feel more natural to make the upper and lower edges of the playing field collidable (I'm sure there's a better word for that), so that moving the paddle is inherently limited by collision with the edges.

blueprint 10y ago

This looks like a complete scam.

Naeron 10y ago
Why do you say that?
- azeirah 10y ago
  To be fair, your site looks like one of those weird overly ambitious overpromising products like * http://madmaniak.github.io/pro/ http://madmaniak.github.io/pro/ * https://thegrid.io/ https://thegrid.io/ (seems like their site is having some difficulties) Before yours, there have been many products that promise to enable programming for everyone, many of these have been scams, utter failures or were just overly marketed mediocre software packages. The things is, the way your video seems voiced to "sell" rather than "explain" what is going on, as well as the odd, or at least "unique" hacker aesthetic of the website makes it look very dubious. I have no idea how to showcase a product like this the "right" way, maybe there is no "right" way, but I can certainly say that the aesthetic, big claims, confusing video and ambitious future plans give the project a bad smell.

dkersten 10y ago

I found the video quite confusing. It seems like its great for things that have an on-screen spatial meaning like the pong example game[1]. But what if I want to represent something abstract? Like a tree (lets say a quad-tree since this is for (2d?) games for now)? Or what if I want to implement AI logic (lets say I want some kind of decision-tree planner and path finding)? I'm having trouble visualising (I guess because the video didn't really go to explain) how any of this can be done, as opposed to "moving something around on the screen". I assume this has been thought about. I just couldn't figure out any of the details from the video. [1] although even in that case, I couldn't figure out what the symbols and lines in the video meant. The symbols especially seem cryptic. A mix between logic gates and something else?

Naeron 10y ago

Many people did not understand the video so I am going to create a detailed explanation.