24 ms·

Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

944 points by interpol_p 9y ago

athenot 9y ago
Very nice! I feel this space is under-developped. Luna reminds me a lot of Apple's Quartz Composer. Visually representing anything complex is an immense challenge, but just like code is broken down into units (files/functions/whatever), a visual tool that can provide a fractal-like representation of a system would be awesome. (I'm looking to dig deeper in this space for some pet projects.)
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We feel the same way. As you have said, we use abstractions to hide complexity in text-based source files, like modules, functions etc. We do the same in the visual form. Every node in Luna is just a function, so you can "dig inside" it (by double clicking it) and see how it is defined. We hide complexity just by "collapsing" nodes together :)
- watersb 9y ago
  Exactly! And Quartz Composer leads to OpenGL shader trees. You may wish to address people who consider themselves "Designers" rather than "Programmers". Seems as if platforms for computer graphic systems production- like Unity or Unreal - would provide a receptive audience. I wonder how they would react.
dlitvakb 9y ago
I'm super interested in this project! I'd like to see how interop really works and how to get multiple data sources interconnected to produce amazing datasets.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Im happy to hear that. We do our best to realease it soon and I'd love to collaborate further with you then!
thecity2 9y ago
I like the idea of category-oriented programming. Would be interested to see a white paper on what that means.
- gramstrong 9y ago
  I'm not sure what the idea even means, or if it really warrants a separate paradigm than OOP. Is it related to category theory? Frustrated that a 'new' paradigm got dropped on me with only a couple sentences of explanation.
  - tree_of_item 9y ago
    It's bogus, they just wanted to use the word "category" to try and lure in FP enthusiasts.
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      It's not a bogus! We are FP enthusiasts and the word "category" has really strong connections to our type system. However, the name might be a little misleading so we've already changed it. Anyway, we treat our types as categories. For example 1 belongs to a singleton category 1 (thus you can write 1 :: 1) but it also belongs to category of positive numbers or all numbers in general, thus again you can write (1 :: 1 :: Nat :: Int :: Num :: *). I hope you see now connections to category theory. However the name itself, as I noted above, could be misleading so we need to change it.
      - shalabhc 9y ago
        1 also belongs to 'all integers from 1 through 10'. Is this also a category? (I assume yes). How is this category expressed in Luna?
        wdanilo 9y ago
        Yes it is, `1 :: 1 | .. | 10`. The pipe combines categories, so you can as well write `1 :: 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10`. Both of the forms are however not yet supported in the main branch of official compiler and will not be supported during the first release yet.
toisanji 9y ago
I'd like to see how the visual representation of larger non toy examples look. Looks like a very cool project !
- wdanilo 9y ago
  hi! Each node "contains inside" graphs of nodes. You can literally select nodes and collapse them into one, new "function". This way you just raise the abstraction level, just like in textual-sources, however in the graphical environment it is just more pleasant to select nodes than re-factoring functions in text :)
indigo0086 9y ago
Interesting. I wonder if this is the future of not only reducing the barrier to entry to software engineering, but setting up a new tier of software engineer for the unskilled. Rather, would software have lower barrier to entry positions that are driven by piecing together software components like they would a factory job. I'm sure for most software a team is only necessary,but as software dominates our future, perhaps this is the bridge to unlocking more opportunities outside of a higher skilled tier of manual coding. I'm just talking off the top of my head, so I may be totally off base. Either way looks interesting, and that futuristic interface is sweet.
- stormbrew 9y ago
  This is one of those things that always seems like it ought to be the future but for various reasons it doesn't take off. My high school computer class used a programming language called ProGraph[1] that looked a lot like this, but without the text representation, and it was neat but honestly it was more tedious to both read and write anything of even moderate complexity than a pure textual form. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph
  - indigo0086 9y ago
    For sure without the text representation, or manual code aspect a language would ultimately fail. I feel that languages that seek to "simplify" often oversimplify and leave those that require more granularity (most programmers) not to buy in. These languages can definitely offer a new paradigm on top of existing languages but it requires some fine control to get mind-share and ultimately take off. I'd say the real test of this, at least aligned with how I see it's future, is recruit not developers but non-devs and see how productive they can be in it, given they have a nice library of components to work from.
    - stormbrew 9y ago
      I fundamentally despise this concept of 'non-devs'. There's just a cyclical definition of non-devs as people who use non-dev tools and vice versa. It's extremely common to dismiss tools used by certain classes of people as non-programmer tools because of who's using them. Look at Excel, which is basically a visual programming language that probably more people know how to program in than know C. But because your boss or your project manager or your sales rep uses it it gets dismissed. Never mind that unlike these things that crop up every now and then people get real work done by programming their computer with it.
Skunkleton 9y ago
Here is the snapshot from when this was submitted to HN about a year and a half ago: http://archive.is/V2VwE http://archive.is/V2VwE My question: what has changed? Has anyone addressed any of the fundamental questions that were posed last time this was submitted? Are there any concrete examples of how you might use this for general purpose programming?
- sleibrock 9y ago
  That's more or less what I want to know. I've been subscribed to Luna for a while but I haven't received any updates or news about it whatsoever. The Twitter account is pretty dead. Even the images on the website seem pretty sketchy since I doubt many of the images are actually real or represent features of the editor. I've pretty much given up on this ever coming out.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    We are alive! I'm really sorry for keeping you waiting for so long, we've been doing our best to make everything happen in the best possible form and I hope you will be happy with Luna after the release :) I'd be very thankful for any feedback after the release, it would help us much!
    - sleibrock 9y ago
      Thanks for chiming in! Hopefully it works out for you guys! :)
- striking 9y ago
  For completeness, the previous threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Luna%20lang&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Luna%20lang&sort=byPopularity&...
- breck 9y ago
  My guess is they ran into problems with syntax. If they alter their language slightly to be an ETN, it could help. Happy to chat more if any of them are reading.
agentultra 9y ago
I find thinking visually to be quite limiting. Although having a mixed textual representation is interesting. I sort of get this with the Moose platform in Pharo which I use for analysis based work. The most painful part of that though is interfacing with foreign systems. And maybe Smalltalk... not a bad language but I've been bitten by the Haskell/Lean/Idris bug. A seamless FFI experience as promised with this language coupled with a toolbox rivalling Moose would be interesting!
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  What is text itself but a visual representation of something complex? I repeat, text is intrinsically visual and just a restrictive form of the alternative which is diagramming. Is it a pure coincidence that the english alphabet happens to be the best primitive for representing programming concepts? I believe that there is no coincidence. English is horrible at representing programming concepts. A limited set of characters, restricted left to right reading and line based structures... is this really the best way to program? Intuitively, things like recursion, data structures, processes, modularity and objects etc, etc, are better represented with diagrams... Wouldn't Circles and lines that can move diagonally across the 2D plane be better candidates as programming primitives? It's hard to say really. Functional programming is in itself a restrictive form of imperative programming that gains power through restriction. It may very well be that English as a programming primitive gains the same type of power through restriction as well. Our brains have dedicated modules for processing language as well as dedicated modules for processing geometry, shapes and diagrams. Which module is better for programming? Let's face it though, English as a programming primitive only became prevalent for historical reasons similar to how javascript (a shitty, shitty language) became prevalent. We like it partly because we're used to it. There has got to be a better way.
  - agentultra 9y ago
    Math. When learning graph theory it can be quite useful at first. But once you start using set theory the graphical representation actually hides more information than it gives and intuition starts to get in the way of us discovering useful properties.
jancsika 9y ago
Where are the node positions stored?
- kustosz 9y ago
  We store them in a separate section in the source file, which is hidden by default when editing. So a bare .luna file is a readable text file, containing some metadata at the bottom, which is not shown when editing with our editor. This way we achieve clear representation and full portability of the source files.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    This way we are also compatible with git etc! :)
    - imhoguy 9y ago
      How about conflict resolving? Is it some base64-like snippet or human readable representation?
  - jancsika 9y ago
    Nice. A few more questions: Is does z-ordering just follow the painter's model? As a user am I allowed to place two nodes at the same x/y coordinate? As a user am I allowed to position nodes in a way that creates a visual ambiguity in the diagram (e.g., two or more perfectly overlapping edges among nodes)? Edit: As a user am I allowed to place a node at an x/y that lies within the bbox of another node?
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      1) it uses painters model 2) you are allowed to place in the same x/y, but we're looking for a way to indicate it to you. 3) you are able to place nodes so the edges overlap, but we also are looking for a way to indicate it to you. Keep in mind, that point 2 and 3 does not happen during your workflow normally, so these are very rare situations. We want to support them just from the "purity" perspective, but they are very low on our priority list currently.
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TFortunato 9y ago
Super super cool project! As someone who does robotics, I'm super eager to try this, and to hopefully contribute to some open-source libraries for this. A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion software, image processing / computer vision, etc. The fact that it is going to be open source, and already seems to have some nice support for things foreign libraries, profiling support, and well as visualizing of your data visually (that image processing graph example!) makes me think you are going to get a good response to this. I also think there are a lot of hobbyist type projects (RasPi level 'smart home' stuff, algorithmic art / music, SDR, anything you see on Make / Hack-A-Day) who would love a tool like this! I'm very interested in checking this out, and in contributing packages / libraries if that will be supported. Hoping to get access to the alpha!
- whowouldathunk 9y ago
  > A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion software, image processing / computer vision, etc. LabVIEW
  - TFortunato 9y ago
    yep, and I've used Labview (and Simulink, and other graphical editors) in the past for some of this. Why I'm excited about this is: 1) It's open source, so we can extend it and hack on it as needed. Thos is probably the biggest reason. 2) The dual textual / graphical representation is really useful in cases where you might want to switch between the two, or one makes more sense than the other. You can do some with text in some the other tools, but the last time I tried, it felt like an after thought more than something expressly designed into the language. 3) It looks to be designed as a general programming language, focussing on having a good compiler, good tooling and a nice foreign function interface. My hope is that this means we can incorporate it into our existing code bases easier than labview, where it kind of wants to stand alone. As an example, perhaps I have a large existing codebase for my robot written in C++ with ROS. Perhaps I could use this to create a new ROS node that does my vision pipeline, by taking advantage of the fact it compiles down to native code, and has a foreign function interface designed in from the start. (Or maybe I'm dreaming, but my hope is it would be easier and more performant than doing the same in Labview!) 4) Did I mention open source :-)
jlebrech 9y ago
I like to see a language that's a simple subset of ruby for example but the OO is delegated to a graphical representation (boxes for classes, arrows for methods etc..)
- wdanilo 9y ago
  I'm afraid Luna is not for you then! However, I strongly doubt that visualization of OO concepts will bring you a productive environment. I also believe that the combination of functional programming and visual paradigm is the way to go here :)
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    How do you do basic branching and loops?
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      Each node is a function, so if a node uses itself, you've got recursion (loop). Branching like if is just few edges going into a node and the result goes out :)
wdanilo 9y ago
Hi guys! My name is Wojciech Danilo and I'm one of the founders of Luna. The timing for this news is a little unfortunate, because we are just before releasing Luna as an Open Source project! However, it's great time to answer some questions and give you a short update what has happened for the last couple months: 1. We've raised a seed round of $1M, so we can safely focus on product development and shortly on community building! 2. We've improved our core technologies to be much more robust, open and extensible, including: - We've re-written our graphical interface to be much more open and extensible (it was previously running on WebGL and now we base just on HTML, so it will be possible to attach any HTML-compatible controls / visualisations directly to nodes) - We've implemented new, better type inferencer and updated Luna compiler in many ways. - And much much more, but I don't want to uncover everything before the release, especially when it's around the corner :) I would love to answer your questions, so If you've got any, just post it here and I'll do my best to cover it. Don't forget to singup for the list at http://luna-lang.org http://luna-lang.org. We'd love to collaborate with you during the upcoming release! :) Cheers, Wojciech
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  What is your business model?
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    First of all, we originate from Open Source community and we believe in it so strong, that we set it as a backbone for our business. We also believe in Open Adoption Software model: https://www.slideshare.net/AccelPartners/the-rise-of-open-adoption-software-oas https://www.slideshare.net/AccelPartners/the-rise-of-open-ad... . Answering the question more directly, we will be providing payed support and hosted computing environment with automatic scalability in the future, however now we will be focusing on building community and helping everyone gain from what Luna has to offer, keeping Luna completely open source and free. Did I answered your question deep enough? :)
    - joshmarlow 9y ago
      Thank you for the link about the Open Adoption Software model. It was a nice read!
halflings 9y ago
This is similar to Knime [0], which lets you build "workflows" visually, and allow you to write custom blocks with Python or Java. The main difference seems that you can represent the whole workflow in a human-readable (and writable) format. https://www.knime.org/example-workflows https://www.knime.org/example-workflows
subhsandhu1 9y ago
Ding Dang Lyrics – Munna Michael (2017) | Tiger Shroff http://www.desilyrics.in/2017/06/ding-dang-lyrics-munna-michael.html http://www.desilyrics.in/2017/06/ding-dang-lyrics-munna-mich...
subhsandhu1 9y ago
Radha Lyrics – Jab Harry Met Sejal | Sunidhi Chauhan http://www.desilyrics.in/2017/06/main-bani-teri-radha-lyrics.html http://www.desilyrics.in/2017/06/main-bani-teri-radha-lyrics...
247yak 9y ago
anyone try bubble.is? Love to get a comparison on how this is better / different.
ruffrey 9y ago
Is this related to the luna programming language experiment by TJ Holowaychuk? https://github.com/tj/luna https://github.com/tj/luna
- kustosz 9y ago
  It's not. That is just a name clash, but in our early days TJ was so kind as to pass the ownership of luna organization on GitHub to us :).
  - deleted 9y ago
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- mendelk 9y ago
  There is also a framework by this name that is (was?) being developed by Asana. Naming is hard in the global namespace!
  - samratjp 9y ago
    Yeah it was - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2191800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2191800
adamgravitis 9y ago
Are you guys going to release something describing your concept of "category oriented programming" any time soon?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We will try to cover it alongside the upcoming release! :)
Meai 9y ago
It sounds like it wont compile to C or use LLVM, you have some kind of custom VM?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We are not going to compile to C, however we will to LLVM IR (not directly though). During the first release we will provide Luna interpreter (so yeah, some kind of custom VM). We are however already working on the backend that compiles Luna to Haskell's GHC Core (https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Compiler/CoreSynType https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Compiler/Co...), which then gets different functional-programming related optimizations and translates to LLVM IR.
pikachuaintcool 9y ago
Pretty bad name, I thought it was a typo for Lua.
- edko 9y ago
  I agree. Lua is moon in Portuguese; Luna is moon in Spanish and Italian.
  - jerry40 9y ago
    Luna is moon in Russian as well (stress is on the second syllable though)
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We use the name for a long time now and we love it, however I agree it could be confusing. We failed, however, to find a better one. I've got a crazy idea here! I know that HN has some magical powers, so if you have any idea of a better name for a dual-representation, functional, visual language, we'd be more than happy to talk about it and change it before the release (after the release it would be too late)! :)
  - vanderZwan 9y ago
    Janus/Ianus? Two headed god of.. You know what, I'll just link the wiki page: > In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (; Latin: Iānus, pronounced [ˈjaː.nus]) is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      Thank you for this name! I really like the connection, it is in fact super cool. The only thing that puts me off when thinking about this name is that "Janus" is a very similar name to "Janusz", which is in polish a name used very often to describe in jokes greedy and unfair entrepreneur :D
adgasf 9y ago
Why implement a new language rather than a GUI on top of Idris, PureScript or similar? (That aside, very excited!)
- kustosz 9y ago
  We needed to design everything from scratch to make sure the two representations are truly interchangeable. Every design decision in the textual language needs to be backed by its visual counterpart, and we found this way of thinking impossible with any other existing language. Then there is the problem of complexity of existing, typed, functional language. We aim to make things as simple as possible, while not sacrificing the power of types, in order to make the language accessible for a much broader audience. I'm super happy to hear that you like it, make sure to sign-up for our newsletter, so we can stay in touch once Luna is out :).
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    I would love to emphasize one of the thoughts from @kustosz reply: our main goal is to make Luna simple and intuitive yet very powerfull. We've got super cool type system on top of purely functional language, however we put our hearts to make the syntax (both visual as well as textual) very simple and intuitive. Neither of the mentioned solutions - Idris, PureScript nor Haskell, Erlang etc are "simple" and "intuitive" to use unless you are really good programmer.
    - tycho01 9y ago
      I'm reading the Idris book now, and one cool thing there is guessing bits of implementation based on the type declarations (there written before implementation). I imagine in a visual environment, being able to make useful suggestions on potential ways to use/combine different nodes/types would help as well as an auto-complete for the user's intent. I'm actually also a bit reminded here of MS Excel Power Query, which also offered a GUI for data transformation, see e.g. [this pic](https://blogs.office.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/6-updates-in-Power-Query-for-Excel-5.png https://blogs.office.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/6-update...). I bring this up because I see you covered visualizing the steps, while they focused on showing the data (though after finishing a transformation the script could be generalized into a reusable function). I wonder if adding a dimension like that could be helpful for Luna as well. If you target non-programmers, showing things as concrete as possible (e.g. their data transformed by whatever function they just pulled together) sounds like it might help make things even more accessible.
bussiere 9y ago
I haven't tested it yet but i mind if this is possible to make microservice with this ? Like defining an port (like 80) an input (a json like {"example":0} make an operation an return a value by the same port and json. It could be an nice way to include micro service into a larger eco system or make people collaborate using luna in larger project. For python you may use hug or flask That s an interesting idea btw good job and good luck
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mrkgnao 9y ago
This looks really beautiful: what's it written in? Also, "Num in IO", nice. Now we wait for someone to write a "(Num in IO) in IO" action.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Hi! We write almost everything in Haskell. By the way, Num in IO in IO is completely ok function signature - it means that you have a function that uses IO to optain a function which will return a number while performing another IO action :) However it is completely ok in Luna for the end user to type it simpler, like `a :: Num` and the compiler will keep track of all "monad transformers" under the hood.
  - rjeli 9y ago
    I think this is a really good idea -- many people, myself included, get really excited about Haskell and then are turned off by the complexity of monad transformers. I would recommend that you focus on good error messages that explain monad-related errors in "user land" and not force them to either guess about what's wrong or suddenly learn all the stuff under the hood. It's a terrible experience and you see it in C++ with incomprehensible template errors or any kind of transpiled language like ClojureScript that gives you errors from the underlying implementation.
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      That is a very good point. We treat "monads" in a very special way in Luna - they have their own type section and we can analyse them and report errors much clearer than Haskell can for example. This does NOT mean that we limit them in any way. You are free to define your monads and convert them to ordinary types or back as you wish :) But we normally dont describe them as monads, just as "context", because it is easier to understand.
msd81257 9y ago
I'd love to hear how this might be applied as a general debugger concept for CUDA and the likes. To a layman like me, CUDA's GDB debugging interface has always left a sour taste in my mouth due to the high amount of parallelism that simply can't be displayed through a debugger entailed to be used only on a single thread. I'd love to see someone working on (and I'm probably going to take a crack at it myself ;) ) not just using this interface as a language, but also as a debugging tool for other languages. Decomposition of CUDA (and other -- thinking Erlang right now especially) programs into bite-sized visualizations in order to program and debug would be invaluable for the space.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  It would be supper cool to debug CUDA with Luna, but keep in mind there is a really long way until it will be possible. It is however very interesting path and I'm super curious where it could lead us to! I'm willing to support it as I can if you would like to try do it by yourself. You will be even able to cut off our backend and use the GUI for your purposes, however more interesting (and even probably also easier) way to do it will be to make some abstractions in backend and build the graph using provided by us backend server, its API and replacing only the interpreter / compiler plugins. To sum this up, a very interesting idea!
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_RPM 9y ago
Any relationship to TJ H's repo, http://github.com/tj/luna http://github.com/tj/luna ?
- kustosz 9y ago
  Other than name – none at all :)
- deleted 9y ago
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fareesh 9y ago
Cool concept - is there an open source repo of some kind which shows how a complex application (kitchen sink kind of app) is made?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Thank you! We will be releasing demos soon!
svtiger 9y ago
May want to remove from your "About Us" bio: "hates Java Script" -- can't say I disagree, but you might alienate potential converts -- really should inject as much positivity as possible. Any negative messaging will do nothing but harm.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  I prefer to alienate potential converts than convert JavaScripters! Just joking of course. It is hard to hide hate to a non-language treated as a super cool language. But you are right, I've never thought about it this way. I will change it, thank you!
  - d3ckard 9y ago
    Well, it was pretty good ad for me, so maybe reconsider.
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      I will reconsider hiding my real feelings. I really feel I should not hide them ;)
      - Jach 9y ago
        Man people who would bail out of the entire project just because of one of the members' likes or dislikes on his bio snippet are petty, please don't optimize for those people...
        dwaltrip 9y ago
        It's not some dramatic "bailing out of an entire project". A more realistic scenario would be: > "Oh here, that link sounds interesting." > "Hmm, another visual programing system, I wonder how it works." > Read for a few minutes, then clicks link to the about page > Reads part about hating javascript. "Huh.. I wonder why they hate it so much" > Gets distracted, makes some coffee > Comes back, and without really thinking about it, closes tab, and goes back to previous task In this scenario, they might have possibly investigated further and checked the project out. Overall, most people probably won't care, but I would guess the statement is slightly net negative. Taking a step back, this entire sub-thread is a fairly ridiculous bikeshedding, and I do feel a little bad about participating in it, heh.
murukesh_s 9y ago
Awesome, we need more visual programming languages coming out now. it's so impossible to convince a programmer who never experienced visual programming how useful/practical it can be. I understand you are from a video processing background where visual programming is widely employed.. We are also building a visual programming platform, inspired from enterprise tools. Really interesting to see this domain evolve.
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polskibus 9y ago
What is it compiled to? Does it target JVM, CLR, native code (if so what platforms?) What is it compiled with? LLVM ? GCC ? Custom compiler? What is the standard library like?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  It targets few backends. Currently it runs on our VM, but we are working on targetting GHC's Haskell Core (which then compiles to LLVM IR). Luna's compiler is of course a custom compiler written in Haskell. Standard library looks cool! Did I answered your questions? :)
  - vopi 9y ago
    >standard library looks cool What does that even mean? No offense, but like I haven't seen any demos on your website and you are describing the std lib as cool? Not exactly confidence aspiring. It looks interesting for sure and looks really fun to mess around with (frankly has a hobbyist high school programmer who likes systems programming, I don't see a whole lot of use for me :)) Good luck.
- drewm1980 9y ago
  It targets GHC
mixedbit 9y ago
How do you envision version control/code reviews with Luna projects? Can diffs be explored at visual level or only source code level? If one developer moves nodes around without altering any logic are such changes tracked in the code repository?
- kustosz 9y ago
  For starters we've made sure to make git diffs as readable as possible. The visual data is kept at the end of text file (hidden when using our editor), usually in a single line. So if you just move nodes around, one line gets changed and it is clear what to ignore when scanning the diff, while making sure to retain the changes in the repository. For later stages, we envision much deeper integrated version control, including viewing git diffs in the visual editor.
  - libeako 9y ago
    This sounds bad. Any info in the text related to the visual representation will be unreadable i guess. Hiding such for diff review is helpful but not enough. Because in merge conflict resolution one may not have the luxury to neglect it.
zimablue 9y ago
This idea will eventually work and be huge I think (I know visual programming languages already exist but a commonly used one to emerge). As someone who believes in metaprogramming and flexibility though I'm hoping for something dynamic, not a heavy mandatory type system that compiles to Haskell.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We believe in something very similar, there are some differences though. Luna type system is not dynamic BUT it is also not mandatory. Our whole standard library does NOT mention a single type - all are inferred by type system and you can, if you want, state them explicitly. To sum this up, we want Luna to be simple to use, intuitive, but have a strongly typed backbone with power similar to Haskell or Idris IF needed. Does it makes sense to you? :)
  - zimablue 9y ago
    Thanks for your response and that does seem like a nice compromise, but it's still not perfect to me. If the choice is <untyped>|<haskell>, it's better than just <haskell> but I'd love some <gradually typed, allows side effects> Good luck with your project, looks pretty cool
hustlechris 9y ago
so when's the ICO?
agentgt 9y ago
Just some minor critiques. What is confusing to me is if the visualization actually running the code or is just static analysis of the code? The reason I ask is if its running then what you have built is a language with an absolutely awesome visual REPL. If it is please say its a language with awesome visual REPL! A potential Excel for programmers killer. There are languages that tried to do this (Squeak, and Racket come to mind) but they were generally academic and more often for students/young adults (and not for businesses). However you say whiteboard through out your marketing which makes me think brainstorming tools ala evernote, orgmode etc. I realize for VC they might prefer whiteboard. Whiteboard to me is sharing and not really a tool. It means I have to register and create a profile when all I really want is a language with a powerful visual REPL. (again just my point of view on marketing).
- kustosz 9y ago
  Why don't we have both? And then some more. It is an awesome REPL with a bit of Excel feel. Runs the code whenever you change it and displays the results in real-time. It is also great for interactive data sources (like web services), where you get the results as soon as they appear upstream. The whiteboard part is super important too. Visual representation is great for design and brainstorming. Even more so, when it provides runtime feedback about your designs. And it gets even more important with collaboration. So at this point we've got a collaborative whiteboard that actually runs the computations. There is, however, one more part to the story. Neither whiteboard, nor a REPL are well suited for implementing the final, production software. We aim to blur the lines between the design and implementation phases, allowing to deploy whatever has just been "sketched".
shalabhc 9y ago
Examples on the home page have broken indentation, or just a multi-level indentation that is confusing? class Point: x y z :: Int origin = Point 0 0 0 Point x y _ = origin print 'Origin XY coords are ($x,$y)' (Why is `origin =` indented at all?)
- marxidad 9y ago
  To line up the equal signs, so all assigned values are aligned as well.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  You are right, all the last 3 lines should be aligned max to the left. We'll fix that soon on new website!
  - shalabhc 9y ago
    Another thing, this example wouldn't type check unless it is verifiably a list of non blank strings: print [s for s in lst if s.head != '_'] The section about dependent typing says `lst.head` would be a compile time error in some cases.
kazinator 9y ago
> Traditional software development is broken by design Which is why Luna is entirely hosted within itself and needs a Luna implementation to bootstrap. We wouldn't want to ask investors to believe in any traditional development after telling them it's broken.
the_cat_kittles 9y ago
im pretty you just got called out and are walking it back now. thats fine. there are lots of ways of handling typing in javascript. i could be reading more into you answers than is there, but your apparent proud ignorance is, i think, fairly deserving of a little bit of public shaming.
- it_learnses 9y ago
  you deserve more public shaming than him. Sure he hates javascript and has valid reasons to do so. You, on the other hand are so insecure (probably because you've spent years using this language), that you have to make personal attacks.
  - the_cat_kittles 9y ago
    well i can tell this is turning into the bad kind of internet commenting. you are calling me insecure- thats a personal attack. is it wrong to call someone a snob for being snobby?
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      is it wrong to call someone a snob for being snobby? I'm not a snob. I grew up on a small farm. I can milk the cows and have moved a few tons of grass by hand because the barn was to small for machinery. I still strongly dislike javascript. Maybe you could respect our right to hate or at least strongly dislike a language that 1. Is being forced upon us as the coolest thing since I don't know what 2. has quite complicated and IMO dumb ideas about equality like 2.1. http://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ http://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ 2.2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/359509 https://stackoverflow.com/a/359509 3. Feels like it changes major parts of one of the build systems every second week ?
      - the_cat_kittles 9y ago
        ok i dont think snob has anything to do with upbringing, but yes- i dont really care for the tons of articles about new dumb frameworks etc, that would only be more annoying if i didnt use js. you are also allowed hate js. just kind of weird to parade around the internet proudly proclaiming it (not you, op)
a-nikolaev 9y ago
Looks like a lazy functional Python ) Very nice aesthetics of presentation. There are a few things I am concerned, if you don't mind: I think that actually visualizing lazy computation can be quite a challenge, because of its on-demand nature. One might say that a lazily defined expression is computed (and should be visualized) where it's used, rather than where it's defined. There is a lot of substitutions going on under the hood, and computation is not as clearly localized as it would be in eager evaluation. Also, the tight binding between the code and the visualizations may limit your ability to optimize code for efficiency. The True / False switch looks cool, but it feels like you are cheating here a little bit by using a boolean literal. Would it look equally nice if it's a function call or some complex expression that is possibly not known yet (as in a function definition)? I have a feeling that at the end of the day Luna may require a very complex visual language that is not easier than the textual alternatives. But this is more like arbitrary concerns that will be hopefully clarified once you release the whole system. Thank you for your work. Thumbs up for exploring these new alternative for writing code. I think, it may help us write better and safer programs in the future.
danem 9y ago
I'm struck by the similarity to grasshopper. This seems to share many of the same features such as visual profiling, visual / textual representation, live previews etc... Has it inspired the design at all?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Grasshopper did not, but Houdini / Touch designer actually did.
daxfohl 9y ago
I'd productize this more as the next level of "spreadsheet" than of "programming language". These kinds of visual programming things always seem to come out with lots of fanfare but then never get used for real work. The spreadsheet, however, is by nature reactive, relational, visual, impromptu, yada yada. But even though spreadsheet tech has added lots of functionality over the years, it's still essentially based on an old paper grid. I could see a product like this challenging that old basis with something more modern. But it still has to do all the stuff regular spreadsheets can do too. And ensuring that it can, and in an intuitive fashion, should probably be the first priority.
- mch82 9y ago
  Or start by doing enough of the stuff Excel can't do easily or at all and then grow into what you've described. For example: * Plot 3d (x,y,z) and 4d (x,y,z,time) graphs * Hook into data streams * Multi-user editing * JSON-like data structures beyond 2d row-column data structures * Improved output formatting
  - daxfohl 9y ago
    I'd be happy enough with floating sheets. To resolve those common things where you've got two different sections, like an analysis with a summary section below it. It's annoying because e.g. changing the column width on the top part also changes the column width on the independent thing below it. A tool that lets me put multiple independent sheets on the same page would be great. If the tool can be programmed to run image processing algorithms on the same page, that's fine too. I'd view "IO" as almost equivalent to "Macro" in that instance. Though not quite. I'd like to be able to have e.g. $A$1 be a filename and $A$2 be the image in file $A$1, and that to be understood as a "pure" transform, even though under the hood it's got to open the file. So "application-scope purity" rather than process-scope purity.
mastazi 9y ago
So in the past I have used two self-proclaimed "visual programming languages", Blueprints[1] and Max[2] and in both cases I found that it is actually harder to be productive while dealing with UI elements than it is to simply write code (as long as you have at least some rudimentary form of autocomplete I guess). However I have to say that, based on the little I've seen, Luna's UI seems to be actually developer-friendly i.e. the UI elements go hand-in-hand with code rather than getting in the way, I think it's brilliant, sort of Jupyter Notebooks on steroids. [1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/ [2] https://cycling74.com/products/max https://cycling74.com/products/max
- crucialfelix 9y ago
  What is interesting here is that you can switch between code and visual representation. All luna code can be looked at in either mode. Max does allow you to use JavaScript or Java and they are doing a lot right now with JavaScript interop/export.
  - mastazi 9y ago
    Thanks for pointing me in that direction, I should have looked at the JS interop capabilities in Max.
- taco_emoji 9y ago
  Part of the difficulty, I think, may be the mismatch between how Luna represents a piece of code and how I visualize it in my head. Is Luna going to draw a line between some related things when I would rather see them, say, in the same color? Will it show an arrow pointing from a data source to its destination, when I would rather see the destination pointing to it's source? My worry is that Luna's visual model of the code will not match my mental model, and the impedance will be too much to overcome.
FridgeSeal 9y ago
This. Looks. Awesome! I literally cannot wait to try this out on some data processing/number crunching stuff! The integrations with the likes of Python are super exciting as well - any plans (even remote ones) to do the same with Julia?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  I'm glad you like it! :) I'm very curious about your feedback after using Luna, don't forget to keep in touch with us after the release! We do not integrate with any language, because the visual representation is just a different syntax for Luna. In fact we keep both syntaxes - textual and visual with the same powers, so you can switch between them, but they are just syntaxes for the same language. Integrating with Julia (or other lang) would be hard because the language has to be designed in such way that it will allow for such dual representation. We put an enormous effort to design Luna this way. However it will be possible to integrate Julia in such way, that some of the nodes would be written in Julia and then even allow to in-place expanding nodes to small text-editors to preview the code in place. It will however not be possible to translate Julias code to graph or vice versa.
danyeaw 9y ago
One of the examples I saw you guys give on YouTube is how complex things are becoming, and you talked about the LOC of a modern car and this is a reason we need visual programming. On your website you also discuss the limitations of UML. To design complex systems like a car, you really need to know not just the functionality and the type of information, but also the structure of the system. How do all of those systems on the car physically connect to result in the behavior. It seems like your approach would be really powerful for data processing, since in that case I don't think the structure matters much. Have you thought about how this could be applied to a complex system where structure is extremely important?
pjdorrell 9y ago
If Luna is dependently typed, can it be used to do theorem proving, eg like Idris?
cdevs 9y ago
What beautiful black magic programming even despite the fact that I hate flow chart programming like unreal and other game engines do.
sullyj3 9y ago
Looks cool! Is the editing environment extensible enough to support an embedded neovim instance?
gfaure 9y ago
Wojciech, this is incredible! The combination of expressiveness, type safety, visual programming and API focus are pretty unique right now. By the way, "Aggresive compile-time optimization" should be "Aggressive compile-time optimization".
pekr 9y ago
Isn't it similar to what Eve is trying to achieve?
pekr 9y ago
Isn't it similar to what Eve tries to achieve? Well, what I like in overal, is an attitude and courage to introduce new technologies! I come from the Red language camp, which if I am not mistaken, is also being funded. So - good luck, guys :-)
- Quiark 9y ago
  I think it's interesting that if you look at this and at Eve, you'll see how both are trying to improve programming and end up at quite different approaches. No size fits all.
- cmontella 9y ago
  Yeah, we have a lot of the same views about programming, but our focus isn't on data science. We can definitely agree that the practice of programming in the future won't look like it does today.
be5invis 9y ago
You say you have dependent types OK, could you define this? data Eq : {a : Type} -> a -> a -> Type where Refl : Eq x x sym : {x : a} -> {y : a} -> Eq x y -> Eq y x sym Refl = Refl replace : {a : Type} -> {x : a} -> {y : a} -> {f : a -> Type} -> Eq x y -> f x -> f y replace Refl p = p
ajarmst 9y ago
Given the name, I would expect this to be related to or built on Lua. That doesn't appear to be the case. Is this echo accidental? "Traditional software development is broken by design" is a pretty strong claim, but the only support is a bunch of over-broad anecdotal claims about what "always" happens. That's a bit offputting for some of us. The phrase "Category Oriented Programming" is used like it's common vernacular, which I don't think it is. Is it related to Category Theory? The text seems to imply that the idea of mixing functional programming with message-sending objects is novel. It really isn't. "Unmatched performance and safety". Yeah. You want to be careful about that claim. Going to need to see the independent evaluation results. That said, for those who value diagrams highly, this looks interesting. I wonder at what level of complexity the abstractions start to leak.
jtha 9y ago
I truly hope you will succeed in your mission. It looks like it could solve so many problems that I've come across as a result of confusion and miscommunication when people with a common understanding step away from the whiteboard and start coding. It can be so hard to align the implementation with the visual abstractions we so desperately need to communicate as humans.
libeako 9y ago
I would like to subscribe to the news, but am afraid to use news-letter services. I suspect they sell the addresses to spammers. Would you please instead set up an atom feed or a primitive blog on Blogger?

944 points by interpol_p 9y ago

Very nice! I feel this space is under-developped. Luna reminds me a lot of Apple's Quartz Composer. Visually representing anything complex is an immense challenge, but just like code is broken down into units (files/functions/whatever), a visual tool that can provide a fractal-like representation of a system would be awesome. (I'm looking to dig deeper in this space for some pet projects.)

wdanilo 9y ago
We feel the same way. As you have said, we use abstractions to hide complexity in text-based source files, like modules, functions etc. We do the same in the visual form. Every node in Luna is just a function, so you can "dig inside" it (by double clicking it) and see how it is defined. We hide complexity just by "collapsing" nodes together :)
watersb 9y ago
Exactly! And Quartz Composer leads to OpenGL shader trees. You may wish to address people who consider themselves "Designers" rather than "Programmers". Seems as if platforms for computer graphic systems production- like Unity or Unreal - would provide a receptive audience. I wonder how they would react.

dlitvakb 9y ago

I'm super interested in this project! I'd like to see how interop really works and how to get multiple data sources interconnected to produce amazing datasets.

wdanilo 9y ago
Im happy to hear that. We do our best to realease it soon and I'd love to collaborate further with you then!

thecity2 9y ago

I like the idea of category-oriented programming. Would be interested to see a white paper on what that means.

gramstrong 9y ago
I'm not sure what the idea even means, or if it really warrants a separate paradigm than OOP. Is it related to category theory? Frustrated that a 'new' paradigm got dropped on me with only a couple sentences of explanation.
- tree_of_item 9y ago
  It's bogus, they just wanted to use the word "category" to try and lure in FP enthusiasts.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    It's not a bogus! We are FP enthusiasts and the word "category" has really strong connections to our type system. However, the name might be a little misleading so we've already changed it. Anyway, we treat our types as categories. For example 1 belongs to a singleton category 1 (thus you can write 1 :: 1) but it also belongs to category of positive numbers or all numbers in general, thus again you can write (1 :: 1 :: Nat :: Int :: Num :: *). I hope you see now connections to category theory. However the name itself, as I noted above, could be misleading so we need to change it.
    - shalabhc 9y ago
      1 also belongs to 'all integers from 1 through 10'. Is this also a category? (I assume yes). How is this category expressed in Luna?
      - wdanilo 9y ago
        Yes it is, `1 :: 1 | .. | 10`. The pipe combines categories, so you can as well write `1 :: 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10`. Both of the forms are however not yet supported in the main branch of official compiler and will not be supported during the first release yet.

toisanji 9y ago

I'd like to see how the visual representation of larger non toy examples look. Looks like a very cool project !

wdanilo 9y ago
hi! Each node "contains inside" graphs of nodes. You can literally select nodes and collapse them into one, new "function". This way you just raise the abstraction level, just like in textual-sources, however in the graphical environment it is just more pleasant to select nodes than re-factoring functions in text :)

indigo0086 9y ago

Interesting. I wonder if this is the future of not only reducing the barrier to entry to software engineering, but setting up a new tier of software engineer for the unskilled. Rather, would software have lower barrier to entry positions that are driven by piecing together software components like they would a factory job. I'm sure for most software a team is only necessary,but as software dominates our future, perhaps this is the bridge to unlocking more opportunities outside of a higher skilled tier of manual coding. I'm just talking off the top of my head, so I may be totally off base. Either way looks interesting, and that futuristic interface is sweet.

stormbrew 9y ago
This is one of those things that always seems like it ought to be the future but for various reasons it doesn't take off. My high school computer class used a programming language called ProGraph[1] that looked a lot like this, but without the text representation, and it was neat but honestly it was more tedious to both read and write anything of even moderate complexity than a pure textual form. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph
- indigo0086 9y ago
  For sure without the text representation, or manual code aspect a language would ultimately fail. I feel that languages that seek to "simplify" often oversimplify and leave those that require more granularity (most programmers) not to buy in. These languages can definitely offer a new paradigm on top of existing languages but it requires some fine control to get mind-share and ultimately take off. I'd say the real test of this, at least aligned with how I see it's future, is recruit not developers but non-devs and see how productive they can be in it, given they have a nice library of components to work from.
  - stormbrew 9y ago
    I fundamentally despise this concept of 'non-devs'. There's just a cyclical definition of non-devs as people who use non-dev tools and vice versa. It's extremely common to dismiss tools used by certain classes of people as non-programmer tools because of who's using them. Look at Excel, which is basically a visual programming language that probably more people know how to program in than know C. But because your boss or your project manager or your sales rep uses it it gets dismissed. Never mind that unlike these things that crop up every now and then people get real work done by programming their computer with it.

Skunkleton 9y ago

Here is the snapshot from when this was submitted to HN about a year and a half ago: http://archive.is/V2VwE http://archive.is/V2VwE My question: what has changed? Has anyone addressed any of the fundamental questions that were posed last time this was submitted? Are there any concrete examples of how you might use this for general purpose programming?

sleibrock 9y ago
That's more or less what I want to know. I've been subscribed to Luna for a while but I haven't received any updates or news about it whatsoever. The Twitter account is pretty dead. Even the images on the website seem pretty sketchy since I doubt many of the images are actually real or represent features of the editor. I've pretty much given up on this ever coming out.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We are alive! I'm really sorry for keeping you waiting for so long, we've been doing our best to make everything happen in the best possible form and I hope you will be happy with Luna after the release :) I'd be very thankful for any feedback after the release, it would help us much!
  - sleibrock 9y ago
    Thanks for chiming in! Hopefully it works out for you guys! :)
striking 9y ago
For completeness, the previous threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Luna%20lang&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Luna%20lang&sort=byPopularity&...
breck 9y ago
My guess is they ran into problems with syntax. If they alter their language slightly to be an ETN, it could help. Happy to chat more if any of them are reading.

agentultra 9y ago

I find thinking visually to be quite limiting. Although having a mixed textual representation is interesting. I sort of get this with the Moose platform in Pharo which I use for analysis based work. The most painful part of that though is interfacing with foreign systems. And maybe Smalltalk... not a bad language but I've been bitten by the Haskell/Lean/Idris bug. A seamless FFI experience as promised with this language coupled with a toolbox rivalling Moose would be interesting!

crimsonalucard 9y ago
What is text itself but a visual representation of something complex? I repeat, text is intrinsically visual and just a restrictive form of the alternative which is diagramming. Is it a pure coincidence that the english alphabet happens to be the best primitive for representing programming concepts? I believe that there is no coincidence. English is horrible at representing programming concepts. A limited set of characters, restricted left to right reading and line based structures... is this really the best way to program? Intuitively, things like recursion, data structures, processes, modularity and objects etc, etc, are better represented with diagrams... Wouldn't Circles and lines that can move diagonally across the 2D plane be better candidates as programming primitives? It's hard to say really. Functional programming is in itself a restrictive form of imperative programming that gains power through restriction. It may very well be that English as a programming primitive gains the same type of power through restriction as well. Our brains have dedicated modules for processing language as well as dedicated modules for processing geometry, shapes and diagrams. Which module is better for programming? Let's face it though, English as a programming primitive only became prevalent for historical reasons similar to how javascript (a shitty, shitty language) became prevalent. We like it partly because we're used to it. There has got to be a better way.
- agentultra 9y ago
  Math. When learning graph theory it can be quite useful at first. But once you start using set theory the graphical representation actually hides more information than it gives and intuition starts to get in the way of us discovering useful properties.

jancsika 9y ago

Where are the node positions stored?

kustosz 9y ago
We store them in a separate section in the source file, which is hidden by default when editing. So a bare .luna file is a readable text file, containing some metadata at the bottom, which is not shown when editing with our editor. This way we achieve clear representation and full portability of the source files.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  This way we are also compatible with git etc! :)
  - imhoguy 9y ago
    How about conflict resolving? Is it some base64-like snippet or human readable representation?
- jancsika 9y ago
  Nice. A few more questions: Is does z-ordering just follow the painter's model? As a user am I allowed to place two nodes at the same x/y coordinate? As a user am I allowed to position nodes in a way that creates a visual ambiguity in the diagram (e.g., two or more perfectly overlapping edges among nodes)? Edit: As a user am I allowed to place a node at an x/y that lies within the bbox of another node?
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    1) it uses painters model 2) you are allowed to place in the same x/y, but we're looking for a way to indicate it to you. 3) you are able to place nodes so the edges overlap, but we also are looking for a way to indicate it to you. Keep in mind, that point 2 and 3 does not happen during your workflow normally, so these are very rare situations. We want to support them just from the "purity" perspective, but they are very low on our priority list currently.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

TFortunato 9y ago

Super super cool project! As someone who does robotics, I'm super eager to try this, and to hopefully contribute to some open-source libraries for this. A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion software, image processing / computer vision, etc. The fact that it is going to be open source, and already seems to have some nice support for things foreign libraries, profiling support, and well as visualizing of your data visually (that image processing graph example!) makes me think you are going to get a good response to this. I also think there are a lot of hobbyist type projects (RasPi level 'smart home' stuff, algorithmic art / music, SDR, anything you see on Make / Hack-A-Day) who would love a tool like this! I'm very interested in checking this out, and in contributing packages / libraries if that will be supported. Hoping to get access to the alpha!

whowouldathunk 9y ago
> A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion software, image processing / computer vision, etc. LabVIEW
- TFortunato 9y ago
  yep, and I've used Labview (and Simulink, and other graphical editors) in the past for some of this. Why I'm excited about this is: 1) It's open source, so we can extend it and hack on it as needed. Thos is probably the biggest reason. 2) The dual textual / graphical representation is really useful in cases where you might want to switch between the two, or one makes more sense than the other. You can do some with text in some the other tools, but the last time I tried, it felt like an after thought more than something expressly designed into the language. 3) It looks to be designed as a general programming language, focussing on having a good compiler, good tooling and a nice foreign function interface. My hope is that this means we can incorporate it into our existing code bases easier than labview, where it kind of wants to stand alone. As an example, perhaps I have a large existing codebase for my robot written in C++ with ROS. Perhaps I could use this to create a new ROS node that does my vision pipeline, by taking advantage of the fact it compiles down to native code, and has a foreign function interface designed in from the start. (Or maybe I'm dreaming, but my hope is it would be easier and more performant than doing the same in Labview!) 4) Did I mention open source :-)

jlebrech 9y ago

I like to see a language that's a simple subset of ruby for example but the OO is delegated to a graphical representation (boxes for classes, arrows for methods etc..)

wdanilo 9y ago
I'm afraid Luna is not for you then! However, I strongly doubt that visualization of OO concepts will bring you a productive environment. I also believe that the combination of functional programming and visual paradigm is the way to go here :)
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  How do you do basic branching and loops?
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    Each node is a function, so if a node uses itself, you've got recursion (loop). Branching like if is just few edges going into a node and the result goes out :)

wdanilo 9y ago

Hi guys! My name is Wojciech Danilo and I'm one of the founders of Luna. The timing for this news is a little unfortunate, because we are just before releasing Luna as an Open Source project! However, it's great time to answer some questions and give you a short update what has happened for the last couple months: 1. We've raised a seed round of $1M, so we can safely focus on product development and shortly on community building! 2. We've improved our core technologies to be much more robust, open and extensible, including: - We've re-written our graphical interface to be much more open and extensible (it was previously running on WebGL and now we base just on HTML, so it will be possible to attach any HTML-compatible controls / visualisations directly to nodes) - We've implemented new, better type inferencer and updated Luna compiler in many ways. - And much much more, but I don't want to uncover everything before the release, especially when it's around the corner :) I would love to answer your questions, so If you've got any, just post it here and I'll do my best to cover it. Don't forget to singup for the list at http://luna-lang.org http://luna-lang.org. We'd love to collaborate with you during the upcoming release! :) Cheers, Wojciech

aaron-lebo 9y ago
What is your business model?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  First of all, we originate from Open Source community and we believe in it so strong, that we set it as a backbone for our business. We also believe in Open Adoption Software model: https://www.slideshare.net/AccelPartners/the-rise-of-open-adoption-software-oas https://www.slideshare.net/AccelPartners/the-rise-of-open-ad... . Answering the question more directly, we will be providing payed support and hosted computing environment with automatic scalability in the future, however now we will be focusing on building community and helping everyone gain from what Luna has to offer, keeping Luna completely open source and free. Did I answered your question deep enough? :)
  - joshmarlow 9y ago
    Thank you for the link about the Open Adoption Software model. It was a nice read!

halflings 9y ago

This is similar to Knime [0], which lets you build "workflows" visually, and allow you to write custom blocks with Python or Java. The main difference seems that you can represent the whole workflow in a human-readable (and writable) format. https://www.knime.org/example-workflows https://www.knime.org/example-workflows

subhsandhu1 9y ago

Ding Dang Lyrics – Munna Michael (2017) | Tiger Shroff http://www.desilyrics.in/2017/06/ding-dang-lyrics-munna-michael.html http://www.desilyrics.in/2017/06/ding-dang-lyrics-munna-mich...

subhsandhu1 9y ago

Radha Lyrics – Jab Harry Met Sejal | Sunidhi Chauhan http://www.desilyrics.in/2017/06/main-bani-teri-radha-lyrics.html http://www.desilyrics.in/2017/06/main-bani-teri-radha-lyrics...

247yak 9y ago

anyone try bubble.is? Love to get a comparison on how this is better / different.

ruffrey 9y ago

Is this related to the luna programming language experiment by TJ Holowaychuk? https://github.com/tj/luna https://github.com/tj/luna

kustosz 9y ago
It's not. That is just a name clash, but in our early days TJ was so kind as to pass the ownership of luna organization on GitHub to us :).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mendelk 9y ago
There is also a framework by this name that is (was?) being developed by Asana. Naming is hard in the global namespace!
- samratjp 9y ago
  Yeah it was - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2191800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2191800

adamgravitis 9y ago

Are you guys going to release something describing your concept of "category oriented programming" any time soon?

wdanilo 9y ago
We will try to cover it alongside the upcoming release! :)

Meai 9y ago

It sounds like it wont compile to C or use LLVM, you have some kind of custom VM?

wdanilo 9y ago
We are not going to compile to C, however we will to LLVM IR (not directly though). During the first release we will provide Luna interpreter (so yeah, some kind of custom VM). We are however already working on the backend that compiles Luna to Haskell's GHC Core (https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Compiler/CoreSynType https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Compiler/Co...), which then gets different functional-programming related optimizations and translates to LLVM IR.

pikachuaintcool 9y ago

Pretty bad name, I thought it was a typo for Lua.

edko 9y ago
I agree. Lua is moon in Portuguese; Luna is moon in Spanish and Italian.
- jerry40 9y ago
  Luna is moon in Russian as well (stress is on the second syllable though)
wdanilo 9y ago
We use the name for a long time now and we love it, however I agree it could be confusing. We failed, however, to find a better one. I've got a crazy idea here! I know that HN has some magical powers, so if you have any idea of a better name for a dual-representation, functional, visual language, we'd be more than happy to talk about it and change it before the release (after the release it would be too late)! :)
- vanderZwan 9y ago
  Janus/Ianus? Two headed god of.. You know what, I'll just link the wiki page: > In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (; Latin: Iānus, pronounced [ˈjaː.nus]) is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    Thank you for this name! I really like the connection, it is in fact super cool. The only thing that puts me off when thinking about this name is that "Janus" is a very similar name to "Janusz", which is in polish a name used very often to describe in jokes greedy and unfair entrepreneur :D

adgasf 9y ago

Why implement a new language rather than a GUI on top of Idris, PureScript or similar? (That aside, very excited!)

kustosz 9y ago
We needed to design everything from scratch to make sure the two representations are truly interchangeable. Every design decision in the textual language needs to be backed by its visual counterpart, and we found this way of thinking impossible with any other existing language. Then there is the problem of complexity of existing, typed, functional language. We aim to make things as simple as possible, while not sacrificing the power of types, in order to make the language accessible for a much broader audience. I'm super happy to hear that you like it, make sure to sign-up for our newsletter, so we can stay in touch once Luna is out :).
- wdanilo 9y ago
  I would love to emphasize one of the thoughts from @kustosz reply: our main goal is to make Luna simple and intuitive yet very powerfull. We've got super cool type system on top of purely functional language, however we put our hearts to make the syntax (both visual as well as textual) very simple and intuitive. Neither of the mentioned solutions - Idris, PureScript nor Haskell, Erlang etc are "simple" and "intuitive" to use unless you are really good programmer.
  - tycho01 9y ago
    I'm reading the Idris book now, and one cool thing there is guessing bits of implementation based on the type declarations (there written before implementation). I imagine in a visual environment, being able to make useful suggestions on potential ways to use/combine different nodes/types would help as well as an auto-complete for the user's intent. I'm actually also a bit reminded here of MS Excel Power Query, which also offered a GUI for data transformation, see e.g. [this pic](https://blogs.office.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/6-updates-in-Power-Query-for-Excel-5.png https://blogs.office.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/6-update...). I bring this up because I see you covered visualizing the steps, while they focused on showing the data (though after finishing a transformation the script could be generalized into a reusable function). I wonder if adding a dimension like that could be helpful for Luna as well. If you target non-programmers, showing things as concrete as possible (e.g. their data transformed by whatever function they just pulled together) sounds like it might help make things even more accessible.

bussiere 9y ago

I haven't tested it yet but i mind if this is possible to make microservice with this ? Like defining an port (like 80) an input (a json like {"example":0} make an operation an return a value by the same port and json. It could be an nice way to include micro service into a larger eco system or make people collaborate using luna in larger project. For python you may use hug or flask That s an interesting idea btw good job and good luck

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mrkgnao 9y ago

This looks really beautiful: what's it written in? Also, "Num in IO", nice. Now we wait for someone to write a "(Num in IO) in IO" action.

wdanilo 9y ago
Hi! We write almost everything in Haskell. By the way, Num in IO in IO is completely ok function signature - it means that you have a function that uses IO to optain a function which will return a number while performing another IO action :) However it is completely ok in Luna for the end user to type it simpler, like `a :: Num` and the compiler will keep track of all "monad transformers" under the hood.
- rjeli 9y ago
  I think this is a really good idea -- many people, myself included, get really excited about Haskell and then are turned off by the complexity of monad transformers. I would recommend that you focus on good error messages that explain monad-related errors in "user land" and not force them to either guess about what's wrong or suddenly learn all the stuff under the hood. It's a terrible experience and you see it in C++ with incomprehensible template errors or any kind of transpiled language like ClojureScript that gives you errors from the underlying implementation.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    That is a very good point. We treat "monads" in a very special way in Luna - they have their own type section and we can analyse them and report errors much clearer than Haskell can for example. This does NOT mean that we limit them in any way. You are free to define your monads and convert them to ordinary types or back as you wish :) But we normally dont describe them as monads, just as "context", because it is easier to understand.

msd81257 9y ago

I'd love to hear how this might be applied as a general debugger concept for CUDA and the likes. To a layman like me, CUDA's GDB debugging interface has always left a sour taste in my mouth due to the high amount of parallelism that simply can't be displayed through a debugger entailed to be used only on a single thread. I'd love to see someone working on (and I'm probably going to take a crack at it myself ;) ) not just using this interface as a language, but also as a debugging tool for other languages. Decomposition of CUDA (and other -- thinking Erlang right now especially) programs into bite-sized visualizations in order to program and debug would be invaluable for the space.

wdanilo 9y ago
It would be supper cool to debug CUDA with Luna, but keep in mind there is a really long way until it will be possible. It is however very interesting path and I'm super curious where it could lead us to! I'm willing to support it as I can if you would like to try do it by yourself. You will be even able to cut off our backend and use the GUI for your purposes, however more interesting (and even probably also easier) way to do it will be to make some abstractions in backend and build the graph using provided by us backend server, its API and replacing only the interpreter / compiler plugins. To sum this up, a very interesting idea!

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_RPM 9y ago

Any relationship to TJ H's repo, http://github.com/tj/luna http://github.com/tj/luna ?

kustosz 9y ago
Other than name – none at all :)
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fareesh 9y ago

Cool concept - is there an open source repo of some kind which shows how a complex application (kitchen sink kind of app) is made?

wdanilo 9y ago
Thank you! We will be releasing demos soon!

svtiger 9y ago

May want to remove from your "About Us" bio: "hates Java Script" -- can't say I disagree, but you might alienate potential converts -- really should inject as much positivity as possible. Any negative messaging will do nothing but harm.

wdanilo 9y ago
I prefer to alienate potential converts than convert JavaScripters! Just joking of course. It is hard to hide hate to a non-language treated as a super cool language. But you are right, I've never thought about it this way. I will change it, thank you!
- d3ckard 9y ago
  Well, it was pretty good ad for me, so maybe reconsider.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    I will reconsider hiding my real feelings. I really feel I should not hide them ;)
    - Jach 9y ago
      Man people who would bail out of the entire project just because of one of the members' likes or dislikes on his bio snippet are petty, please don't optimize for those people...
      - dwaltrip 9y ago
        It's not some dramatic "bailing out of an entire project". A more realistic scenario would be: > "Oh here, that link sounds interesting." > "Hmm, another visual programing system, I wonder how it works." > Read for a few minutes, then clicks link to the about page > Reads part about hating javascript. "Huh.. I wonder why they hate it so much" > Gets distracted, makes some coffee > Comes back, and without really thinking about it, closes tab, and goes back to previous task In this scenario, they might have possibly investigated further and checked the project out. Overall, most people probably won't care, but I would guess the statement is slightly net negative. Taking a step back, this entire sub-thread is a fairly ridiculous bikeshedding, and I do feel a little bad about participating in it, heh.

murukesh_s 9y ago

Awesome, we need more visual programming languages coming out now. it's so impossible to convince a programmer who never experienced visual programming how useful/practical it can be. I understand you are from a video processing background where visual programming is widely employed.. We are also building a visual programming platform, inspired from enterprise tools. Really interesting to see this domain evolve.

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polskibus 9y ago

What is it compiled to? Does it target JVM, CLR, native code (if so what platforms?) What is it compiled with? LLVM ? GCC ? Custom compiler? What is the standard library like?

wdanilo 9y ago
It targets few backends. Currently it runs on our VM, but we are working on targetting GHC's Haskell Core (which then compiles to LLVM IR). Luna's compiler is of course a custom compiler written in Haskell. Standard library looks cool! Did I answered your questions? :)
- vopi 9y ago
  >standard library looks cool What does that even mean? No offense, but like I haven't seen any demos on your website and you are describing the std lib as cool? Not exactly confidence aspiring. It looks interesting for sure and looks really fun to mess around with (frankly has a hobbyist high school programmer who likes systems programming, I don't see a whole lot of use for me :)) Good luck.
drewm1980 9y ago
It targets GHC

mixedbit 9y ago

How do you envision version control/code reviews with Luna projects? Can diffs be explored at visual level or only source code level? If one developer moves nodes around without altering any logic are such changes tracked in the code repository?

kustosz 9y ago
For starters we've made sure to make git diffs as readable as possible. The visual data is kept at the end of text file (hidden when using our editor), usually in a single line. So if you just move nodes around, one line gets changed and it is clear what to ignore when scanning the diff, while making sure to retain the changes in the repository. For later stages, we envision much deeper integrated version control, including viewing git diffs in the visual editor.
- libeako 9y ago
  This sounds bad. Any info in the text related to the visual representation will be unreadable i guess. Hiding such for diff review is helpful but not enough. Because in merge conflict resolution one may not have the luxury to neglect it.

zimablue 9y ago

This idea will eventually work and be huge I think (I know visual programming languages already exist but a commonly used one to emerge). As someone who believes in metaprogramming and flexibility though I'm hoping for something dynamic, not a heavy mandatory type system that compiles to Haskell.

wdanilo 9y ago
We believe in something very similar, there are some differences though. Luna type system is not dynamic BUT it is also not mandatory. Our whole standard library does NOT mention a single type - all are inferred by type system and you can, if you want, state them explicitly. To sum this up, we want Luna to be simple to use, intuitive, but have a strongly typed backbone with power similar to Haskell or Idris IF needed. Does it makes sense to you? :)
- zimablue 9y ago
  Thanks for your response and that does seem like a nice compromise, but it's still not perfect to me. If the choice is <untyped>|<haskell>, it's better than just <haskell> but I'd love some <gradually typed, allows side effects> Good luck with your project, looks pretty cool

hustlechris 9y ago

so when's the ICO?

agentgt 9y ago

Just some minor critiques. What is confusing to me is if the visualization actually running the code or is just static analysis of the code? The reason I ask is if its running then what you have built is a language with an absolutely awesome visual REPL. If it is please say its a language with awesome visual REPL! A potential Excel for programmers killer. There are languages that tried to do this (Squeak, and Racket come to mind) but they were generally academic and more often for students/young adults (and not for businesses). However you say whiteboard through out your marketing which makes me think brainstorming tools ala evernote, orgmode etc. I realize for VC they might prefer whiteboard. Whiteboard to me is sharing and not really a tool. It means I have to register and create a profile when all I really want is a language with a powerful visual REPL. (again just my point of view on marketing).

kustosz 9y ago
Why don't we have both? And then some more. It is an awesome REPL with a bit of Excel feel. Runs the code whenever you change it and displays the results in real-time. It is also great for interactive data sources (like web services), where you get the results as soon as they appear upstream. The whiteboard part is super important too. Visual representation is great for design and brainstorming. Even more so, when it provides runtime feedback about your designs. And it gets even more important with collaboration. So at this point we've got a collaborative whiteboard that actually runs the computations. There is, however, one more part to the story. Neither whiteboard, nor a REPL are well suited for implementing the final, production software. We aim to blur the lines between the design and implementation phases, allowing to deploy whatever has just been "sketched".

shalabhc 9y ago

Examples on the home page have broken indentation, or just a multi-level indentation that is confusing? class Point: x y z :: Int origin = Point 0 0 0 Point x y _ = origin print 'Origin XY coords are ($x,$y)' (Why is `origin =` indented at all?)

marxidad 9y ago
To line up the equal signs, so all assigned values are aligned as well.
wdanilo 9y ago
You are right, all the last 3 lines should be aligned max to the left. We'll fix that soon on new website!
- shalabhc 9y ago
  Another thing, this example wouldn't type check unless it is verifiably a list of non blank strings: print [s for s in lst if s.head != '_'] The section about dependent typing says `lst.head` would be a compile time error in some cases.

kazinator 9y ago

> Traditional software development is broken by design Which is why Luna is entirely hosted within itself and needs a Luna implementation to bootstrap. We wouldn't want to ask investors to believe in any traditional development after telling them it's broken.

the_cat_kittles 9y ago

im pretty you just got called out and are walking it back now. thats fine. there are lots of ways of handling typing in javascript. i could be reading more into you answers than is there, but your apparent proud ignorance is, i think, fairly deserving of a little bit of public shaming.

it_learnses 9y ago
you deserve more public shaming than him. Sure he hates javascript and has valid reasons to do so. You, on the other hand are so insecure (probably because you've spent years using this language), that you have to make personal attacks.
- the_cat_kittles 9y ago
  well i can tell this is turning into the bad kind of internet commenting. you are calling me insecure- thats a personal attack. is it wrong to call someone a snob for being snobby?
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    is it wrong to call someone a snob for being snobby? I'm not a snob. I grew up on a small farm. I can milk the cows and have moved a few tons of grass by hand because the barn was to small for machinery. I still strongly dislike javascript. Maybe you could respect our right to hate or at least strongly dislike a language that 1. Is being forced upon us as the coolest thing since I don't know what 2. has quite complicated and IMO dumb ideas about equality like 2.1. http://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ http://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/ 2.2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/359509 https://stackoverflow.com/a/359509 3. Feels like it changes major parts of one of the build systems every second week ?
    - the_cat_kittles 9y ago
      ok i dont think snob has anything to do with upbringing, but yes- i dont really care for the tons of articles about new dumb frameworks etc, that would only be more annoying if i didnt use js. you are also allowed hate js. just kind of weird to parade around the internet proudly proclaiming it (not you, op)

a-nikolaev 9y ago

Looks like a lazy functional Python ) Very nice aesthetics of presentation. There are a few things I am concerned, if you don't mind: I think that actually visualizing lazy computation can be quite a challenge, because of its on-demand nature. One might say that a lazily defined expression is computed (and should be visualized) where it's used, rather than where it's defined. There is a lot of substitutions going on under the hood, and computation is not as clearly localized as it would be in eager evaluation. Also, the tight binding between the code and the visualizations may limit your ability to optimize code for efficiency. The True / False switch looks cool, but it feels like you are cheating here a little bit by using a boolean literal. Would it look equally nice if it's a function call or some complex expression that is possibly not known yet (as in a function definition)? I have a feeling that at the end of the day Luna may require a very complex visual language that is not easier than the textual alternatives. But this is more like arbitrary concerns that will be hopefully clarified once you release the whole system. Thank you for your work. Thumbs up for exploring these new alternative for writing code. I think, it may help us write better and safer programs in the future.

danem 9y ago

I'm struck by the similarity to grasshopper. This seems to share many of the same features such as visual profiling, visual / textual representation, live previews etc... Has it inspired the design at all?

wdanilo 9y ago
Grasshopper did not, but Houdini / Touch designer actually did.

daxfohl 9y ago

I'd productize this more as the next level of "spreadsheet" than of "programming language". These kinds of visual programming things always seem to come out with lots of fanfare but then never get used for real work. The spreadsheet, however, is by nature reactive, relational, visual, impromptu, yada yada. But even though spreadsheet tech has added lots of functionality over the years, it's still essentially based on an old paper grid. I could see a product like this challenging that old basis with something more modern. But it still has to do all the stuff regular spreadsheets can do too. And ensuring that it can, and in an intuitive fashion, should probably be the first priority.

mch82 9y ago
Or start by doing enough of the stuff Excel can't do easily or at all and then grow into what you've described. For example: * Plot 3d (x,y,z) and 4d (x,y,z,time) graphs * Hook into data streams * Multi-user editing * JSON-like data structures beyond 2d row-column data structures * Improved output formatting
- daxfohl 9y ago
  I'd be happy enough with floating sheets. To resolve those common things where you've got two different sections, like an analysis with a summary section below it. It's annoying because e.g. changing the column width on the top part also changes the column width on the independent thing below it. A tool that lets me put multiple independent sheets on the same page would be great. If the tool can be programmed to run image processing algorithms on the same page, that's fine too. I'd view "IO" as almost equivalent to "Macro" in that instance. Though not quite. I'd like to be able to have e.g. $A$1 be a filename and $A$2 be the image in file $A$1, and that to be understood as a "pure" transform, even though under the hood it's got to open the file. So "application-scope purity" rather than process-scope purity.

mastazi 9y ago

So in the past I have used two self-proclaimed "visual programming languages", Blueprints[1] and Max[2] and in both cases I found that it is actually harder to be productive while dealing with UI elements than it is to simply write code (as long as you have at least some rudimentary form of autocomplete I guess). However I have to say that, based on the little I've seen, Luna's UI seems to be actually developer-friendly i.e. the UI elements go hand-in-hand with code rather than getting in the way, I think it's brilliant, sort of Jupyter Notebooks on steroids. [1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/ [2] https://cycling74.com/products/max https://cycling74.com/products/max

crucialfelix 9y ago
What is interesting here is that you can switch between code and visual representation. All luna code can be looked at in either mode. Max does allow you to use JavaScript or Java and they are doing a lot right now with JavaScript interop/export.
- mastazi 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing me in that direction, I should have looked at the JS interop capabilities in Max.
taco_emoji 9y ago
Part of the difficulty, I think, may be the mismatch between how Luna represents a piece of code and how I visualize it in my head. Is Luna going to draw a line between some related things when I would rather see them, say, in the same color? Will it show an arrow pointing from a data source to its destination, when I would rather see the destination pointing to it's source? My worry is that Luna's visual model of the code will not match my mental model, and the impedance will be too much to overcome.

FridgeSeal 9y ago

This. Looks. Awesome! I literally cannot wait to try this out on some data processing/number crunching stuff! The integrations with the likes of Python are super exciting as well - any plans (even remote ones) to do the same with Julia?

wdanilo 9y ago
I'm glad you like it! :) I'm very curious about your feedback after using Luna, don't forget to keep in touch with us after the release! We do not integrate with any language, because the visual representation is just a different syntax for Luna. In fact we keep both syntaxes - textual and visual with the same powers, so you can switch between them, but they are just syntaxes for the same language. Integrating with Julia (or other lang) would be hard because the language has to be designed in such way that it will allow for such dual representation. We put an enormous effort to design Luna this way. However it will be possible to integrate Julia in such way, that some of the nodes would be written in Julia and then even allow to in-place expanding nodes to small text-editors to preview the code in place. It will however not be possible to translate Julias code to graph or vice versa.

danyeaw 9y ago

One of the examples I saw you guys give on YouTube is how complex things are becoming, and you talked about the LOC of a modern car and this is a reason we need visual programming. On your website you also discuss the limitations of UML. To design complex systems like a car, you really need to know not just the functionality and the type of information, but also the structure of the system. How do all of those systems on the car physically connect to result in the behavior. It seems like your approach would be really powerful for data processing, since in that case I don't think the structure matters much. Have you thought about how this could be applied to a complex system where structure is extremely important?

pjdorrell 9y ago

If Luna is dependently typed, can it be used to do theorem proving, eg like Idris?

cdevs 9y ago

What beautiful black magic programming even despite the fact that I hate flow chart programming like unreal and other game engines do.

sullyj3 9y ago

Looks cool! Is the editing environment extensible enough to support an embedded neovim instance?

gfaure 9y ago

Wojciech, this is incredible! The combination of expressiveness, type safety, visual programming and API focus are pretty unique right now. By the way, "Aggresive compile-time optimization" should be "Aggressive compile-time optimization".

pekr 9y ago

Isn't it similar to what Eve is trying to achieve?

pekr 9y ago

Isn't it similar to what Eve tries to achieve? Well, what I like in overal, is an attitude and courage to introduce new technologies! I come from the Red language camp, which if I am not mistaken, is also being funded. So - good luck, guys :-)

Quiark 9y ago
I think it's interesting that if you look at this and at Eve, you'll see how both are trying to improve programming and end up at quite different approaches. No size fits all.
cmontella 9y ago
Yeah, we have a lot of the same views about programming, but our focus isn't on data science. We can definitely agree that the practice of programming in the future won't look like it does today.

be5invis 9y ago

You say you have dependent types OK, could you define this? data Eq : {a : Type} -> a -> a -> Type where Refl : Eq x x sym : {x : a} -> {y : a} -> Eq x y -> Eq y x sym Refl = Refl replace : {a : Type} -> {x : a} -> {y : a} -> {f : a -> Type} -> Eq x y -> f x -> f y replace Refl p = p

ajarmst 9y ago

Given the name, I would expect this to be related to or built on Lua. That doesn't appear to be the case. Is this echo accidental? "Traditional software development is broken by design" is a pretty strong claim, but the only support is a bunch of over-broad anecdotal claims about what "always" happens. That's a bit offputting for some of us. The phrase "Category Oriented Programming" is used like it's common vernacular, which I don't think it is. Is it related to Category Theory? The text seems to imply that the idea of mixing functional programming with message-sending objects is novel. It really isn't. "Unmatched performance and safety". Yeah. You want to be careful about that claim. Going to need to see the independent evaluation results. That said, for those who value diagrams highly, this looks interesting. I wonder at what level of complexity the abstractions start to leak.

jtha 9y ago

I truly hope you will succeed in your mission. It looks like it could solve so many problems that I've come across as a result of confusion and miscommunication when people with a common understanding step away from the whiteboard and start coding. It can be so hard to align the implementation with the visual abstractions we so desperately need to communicate as humans.

libeako 9y ago

I would like to subscribe to the news, but am afraid to use news-letter services. I suspect they sell the addresses to spammers. Would you please instead set up an atom feed or a primitive blog on Blogger?