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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

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!
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      I'm glad you like it! :)
gravypod 9y ago
What kind of plots can you make with this? This has real potential in the big-data and scientific fields. Plotting is hard and if you can easily tie together many data sources and models that are popular onto time series and geospatial plots this will be a winning combo go scientists.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  You can connect to our data ANY HTML/JS compatible visualisation. Moreover Luna has some basic (and they are getting better with every day) bindings to drawing over webgl canvas, so you can define visualisations using our nodes. We will be showing examples how to define efficient heatmaps / custom plots using few nodes interactively in Luna. We will be more than happy to collaborate with you and anyone interested in data visualisations soon, so lets stay in touch! :)
  - gravypod 9y ago
    If you can, internally, handle adding together multiple data sources you'll win in the academic space with something like this. Especially if you can choose a Python syntax for the "code" portion. In scientific spaces you have many data sources that all mean completely different things. They are all recorded in different coordinate spaces (mag, distances, polar, etc) and you want to plot many of these things into the same plot and have them go where they were meant to be. If you could generate 3D plots as well just by flipping a switch that would be a huge plus. The hard part is that we have many modeling softwares that are written in strange ways and in strange formats. One example of a very popular model with a difficult interface is the IRI (http://irimodel.org/ http://irimodel.org/). If you could just link a node of "IRI" into "Earth Plot" then that would be awesome.
auggierose 9y ago
Sounds pretty cool. Looking forward to it. Don't rewrite the graphical interface again, though ;-)
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We would not rewrite anything again soon :) We decided to rewrite it because of all the gains we gather from it (including both features as well as much increased speed of development) and it already (almost) payed off.
jancsika 9y ago
How does this compare to NoFlo?
pier25 9y ago
Is this intended for a general purpose programming?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Yes, it's one of our core goals! :)
z5h 9y ago
Great news! What are the hold-ups in going open source? How soon is "just before"?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  There are no hold-ups really. We just want to release Luna in a form when you will tell "oh, that's a cool project I would like to contribute to" rather than "interesting, let's wait until it is usable". We are right now finishing installers on all platforms, making examples and working on new website. I don't want to set a deadline, but we work hard to make it just "around the corner" and a you can see, we're almost there :)
indescions_2017 9y ago
Really cool you chose to do an image processing demo with the "color grading" example. That is such a natural fit for visual programming. I could see Luna fitting into a video post-production or digital asset creation pipeline for games. The combination of a visual interface and functional logic could be used to create mind-blowing custom procedural solutions! Have you given any thought as to what media libraries you might use for the final stage rendering of audio, video, bitmaps, 3d scenes, etc. Because I think it's possible it may be entirely done in HTML5 / JS... Keep up the good work!
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  The thing there is that is already how image processing and compositing has been done for 30 years. Check out Nuke, Digital Fusion (which is free), Shake, Flame, etc.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    @CyberDildonics, I think that @indescions_2017 was referring to pipelines suitable to be run inside game engines, working at "runtime", not batch-processing data upfront. You cannot utilize any of the software you mentioned to do it. You can use Houdini engine, but it's image processing capabilities are super limited currently and even if they improve, you are limited to thinking in the context of SOPs, DOPs, CHOPs etc, without being able to extend it with custom datatypes and procedures.
    - thisjeremiah 9y ago
      TouchDesigner (https://www.derivative.ca/ https://www.derivative.ca/) or vvvv (https://vvvv.org/ https://vvvv.org/) are more comparable, since these systems DO work in realtime environments. But yeah, you still have to think in the context of SOPs, TOPs, CHOPs...
      - wdanilo 9y ago
        You cannot embed touchdesigner in a game engine (at last with ease). VVVV does not comes with abstraction over DOPs SOPs etc, but both are still very limited regarding what datatypes they can process.
seanwilson 9y ago
Can you elaborate more on the dependent type system? Is type checking decidable? What restrictions does it have to keep automatic type checking feasible?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We were thinking how to answer this question yesterday, but it is just too broad and I've literally cannot afford explaining all the caveats now. I will be supper happy to talk about it after the release on Luna forum, so if we could just move it there and discuss it in some short time, I would be thankful :)
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We were thinking how to answer this question yesterday, but it is just too broad and I've literally cannot afford explaining all the caveats now. I will be supper happy to talk about it after the release on Luna forum, so if we could just move it there and discuss it in some short time, I would be thankful :)
kowdermeister 9y ago
How did you convince VC-s, that there's need for a new programming language? (I'm totally not saying there's no need, but since it's highly technical and I probably would fail at it I'm really curious)
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We are not really making a programming language. So, err.. ok, we are. But it is "just" an engine. Luna is a data processing platform. It allows you to prototype, design and deploy data processing applications much faster than it is currently possible, while working in an elegant, interactive data visualization environment. Moreover, we are supported by many cool companies that want to use Luna for their purposes, including IOT, Data Science or Bioinformatics ones. We got a really big interest in our technologies and we've collected the whole round in less than 6 weeks, choosing the investors we liked among many that wanted to contribute. I'm writing about it because I'm really very grateful for their help and super happy that the need for such development is widely recognized.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Haha, I was thinking the same. Well it's not really a programming language, but a data processing platform, business people love that -> VCs love that.
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      Lets underline one important thing. Luna really is nut just a language, it really is a data processing / visualization platform! :D
  - kowdermeister 9y ago
    Thanks for the response, it makes more sense now. However your site does say it's "just" a programming language with huge font size :) You might want to add what you just posted, there's nothing wrong with it, but it would make more people to get it IMHO.
xor1 9y ago
I really like how the Luna site looks. As someone who knows nothing about web front-end, how was it made? Custom-built? Template?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Our programmer designed it and we've just build it using some standard bootstrap. It might seem like a joke, but it's currently not :D
  - xor1 9y ago
    Ahh, I actually really like it alot!
    - waterpowder 9y ago
      http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ie/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ie/2010/04/alot-is-better-...
      - wdanilo 9y ago
        thanks alot! :D
  - mkl 9y ago
    You might want to adjust the colours, and look at it on a few more screens. The medium grey on dark grey is pretty unreadable - the only reason I didn't close the page immediately is the number of upvotes it got on HN.
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      Would it help if we put a button "high-contrast"? On vast majority of displays the website looks well balanced and not eye-burning, but of course it does not cover older displays, displays that are dimmed or used in heavy lighting. Would such button solve your problems or do you think we should just strongly re-consider how we present everything?
bluetwo 9y ago
I'm interested in seeing how an open source programming language/platform with a clean GUI will evolve. Curious to see this in a year!
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We are also super curious and we hope it will shine. If you hope for it too, let's contribute! We'd love to work with you to polish it as much as possible! :)
  - jamiek88 9y ago
    Is there a way for a beginning developer to help? Maybe with documentation? I could at least help with editing / proof reading and the drudge work you guys are too talented to be doing! Your time is much better spent on the core development.
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      There is always a way to help and we are very grateful for helping us. It means a lot to me. But please, do not treat us like "too talented to do something". I feel just wrong then :) Drop me a line at wojciech at luna-lang.org and we could work something out :) I do not promise we will be able to collaborate before the release (we've got our hands full of work and we're hardly sleeping in nights now), but in the early days / moths after the release the help would be much needed and we would love to build community around people as passionate as you are! Thank you! :)
shalabhc 9y ago
Ah - great to hear you're open sourcing it because I was a bit put off by 'sign up to be selected' form, even though the product is fascinating.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Sorry for putting off. I will explain that a little bit - we want to build community around people which are active, passionate and determined enough to fill such a form. I understand why it could be perceived negatively, sorry for that! :)
  - shalabhc 9y ago
    But without giving access, how can you expect passion? :-) Let everyone check it out, the passionate ones will engage more through any channels you have (mailing lists, chat, twitter) and be easy to find, IMO.
    - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
      I don't disagree with you, though don't necessarily agree, either because I don't know that passionate people are communicative people. I know many passionate people, myself included, who've been known to be rather introverted. After reading some of their comments & the copy on their homepage, the creators of Luna sound like they could be fairly mindful people. I'm betting they're seeking people who enshrine certain values to seed their community with & want to privately establish a relationship with them. I find this approach appealing to my introverted side, as a result. The next mindful step would be to open things up to everyone immediately to allow the ensuing flood of extroverts & introverts alike. This approach seems like it could counter starting off with winner-take-all mechanics in the community's culture. Then again, all I know about the product is from the first bits of text on their site & this post. I didn't know they weren't simply allowing everyone in until this thread. I could be totally off on how they're rolling. If I am, I'll have to take some time to examine my confirmation biases.
      - 9y ago
akavel 9y ago
Wouldn't it be trouble if I tried to visit you at your office tomorrow? :) Not sure if time (and traffic) will let me, but I'm in the same city, and super interested in your project... would love to talk some... note: not an investor in any way, sorry ;) but I wanted to build something similar in some ways, and now have high hopes that maybe I won't have to, maybe I'll be just able to build on it/extend it! If you're ok, what time would be cool for you?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Sure, it's a super cool idea. Let's drop me an email to wojciech at luna-lang.org and we set all the details (time / place etc) - we've got a parking place here, but its "hidden" so if you will be driving car, you can park here without problems! :) We are not looking for any investments now but we are looking to collaborate with everyone interested in Luna, so that sounds like a "perfect match" for us! :D
  - akavel 9y ago
    Sent! Please check your spam folder ;) Also copied to the address from your website, or are both correct?
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      I've got it and just replied. See you tomorrow! :)
spuz 9y ago
What is the largest program written in Luna? How does Luna compare with other mainstream programming languages for complex applications such as compilers, browsers and web applications?
- kustosz 9y ago
  The standard library is 3-ish kLOCs (written entirely in Luna) and growing, the biggest use cases we've created so far were around 500 LOCs. Performance-wise, we are letting the GHC compiler infrastructure do most of the heavy lifting. As for the more complex applications, it may be tricky to create a compiler or a web browser in Luna in its current state, but we are constantly working on on improving the performance, with the goal to match Haskell's. Web applications (particularly microservices) are among our main focuses now, so that's entirely within our reach.
quadcore 9y ago
Im just wondering what's the purpose of the language itself. Ideally you would like to use the programming language you want and still have the visualisation stuff.
shmolyneaux 9y ago
Very cool project! What license are you planning on using?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We are considering MIT or Apache v2, what do you recommend?
  - spot 9y ago
    apache2 because of the patent protections.
    - delhanty 9y ago
      Straight question for the uninformed (me): Could you (or anyone else) elaborate on MIT vs Apache V2 and patent protection?
      - delhanty 9y ago
        OK - found this on Quora [1] that gave me some idea. I asked before as googling because there are often very well-informed software legal opinions on HN. [1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-different-between-Apache-v2-0-and-MIT-license https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-different-between-Apache-v2-...
dgreensp 9y ago
Can I implement pixel-level video effects with Luna (e.g. warping, time map, segmentation, keying, etc.)?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Sure! Is webgl good enough for you? If so, I will prepare an example and include it in the official release. If you need more "standard" GPU power, then it will be possible, but a little bit hackish on the beginning (we don't have libraries for it yet and you will need to connect to other language to keep the performance. We will support language interoperability, but in the first reelease it will be hackish. Still if you'll need it, I'll show you how to do it) :)
  - dgreensp 9y ago
    Thanks for the reply! So do you have first-class support for video as well as images? It seems like to have fun with video editing in Luna, you'd need to have built-in support for videos an inputs and outputs, and have a way to play the video output on the screen, and maybe scrub through it, and at a minimum be able to run shaders on the "current frame" and export the resulting video out. The next level after that would be being able to load multiple frames into memory at the same time, and being able to do a combination of "offline" and "online" processing with some CPU involvement (e.g. calculating a motion track and storing it, or applying a filter that can't be expressed as a pure shader program). I don't know enough about Luna yet to know what code to do these things would "look" like on the visual side, or come to think of it where the computation is being performed (in the browser?). Much more to learn, but the project looks great, a sort of "holy grail" in a way.
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      Hi! Thank you for such great description of the process. In fact I know it well, I originate from the same domain - i was working for few years as FX TD :) You can think of Luna just like about a general purpose programming language. You can define your own types and you can even define how to decode bits from binary files to your structures. The GUI runs in HTML, so you can utilize any html component to display output. Definitely, your use case is doeable, however the amount of libraries currently available is very, very low, so it will need some love :) Did I answered your questions? :)
amrrs 9y ago
When you're talking about building a community, I'm wondering how are you going to convince Data Scientists who are pretty much used to R and Python and not any functional programming language, try Luna? Any plans for it? Like a free course on Udemy or any mooc to take this to masses?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We are open to suggestions here. We know that Luna brings a great power to Data Scientists but there have to be a good way to show this power to them. I don't know currently what way would be the best and we've got a little time until we do it. For now, the first milestone for us is to build community around good programmers (including good programmers from the data science field) and later target less technical people. Any suggestions however, are very important to us!
  - marmaduke 9y ago
    I'd be interested in (and have some experience) in bridging Python with other (data-heavy) languages, which would let you pull in a lot of functionality as nodes in your graph, or expose your graph as functions in Python.
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      Great! I'd like to help make it happen. Please sign to our list and make sure you read mails from spam folder. Let's be in touch after the release, soon. Alternatively, just drop me a line at wojciech at luna-lang.org and let's stay in touch! :)
  - crowaycrestcan 9y ago
    The power of e.g. matlab for engineering disciplines is in the profound library. The optimized performance of the core language not withstanding, optimizing the library takes many people, often enough graduates, doctorates and professors.
- malberto 9y ago
  No gil. Draw your own neural network, pipeline or graphical model in an idiomatic way. If you can display profiling data on top of the code visualization you can go faster toward optimizing the most time consuming parts of your code. For a data scientist all this is gold.
imhoguy 9y ago
One click deployment example to AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions could be killer scenario!
- wdanilo 9y ago
  This is what we want to deliver a little bit later. So you could go to our website, click "start", make the graph and everything will be run and scaled automatically for you, delivering you the results. Are we talking about the same functionality? (I'm abstracting over particular hardware provider).
  - hustlechris 9y ago
    1 click deployment to something like golem.network would be even cooler
    - kustosz 9y ago
      Interesting idea! Are you thinking about any specific applications you'd like to deploy there? I'd love to learn more
deleted 9y ago
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bobwaycott 9y ago
This really looks fantastic, and I'd love to give it a spin. I could see this being pretty awesome to both use myself on projects, and with people I spend time with helping them learn to develop serious applications. Looking forward to see where Luna goes. Congrats on a great-looking product!
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Bob I'm happy you like it! We'd love to hear your feedback after your tests :)
yellowapple 9y ago
"we are just before releasing Luna as an Open Source project!" Is there a particular timeline on that? I'd love to see how this is implemented (and - importantly - whether or not this can easily be integrated into other software).
- wdanilo 9y ago
  We are right now finishing installers on all platforms, making examples and working on new website. I don't want to set a deadline, but we work hard to make it just "around the corner" and a you can see, we're almost there :)
agumonkey 9y ago
inspirations please ? brett victor ? dataflow / node based modeling ? others ?
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Houdini, Haskell, Python, Ruby, MaxMSP. I think these were the strongest influencers.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    I can finally say Houdini is a PL influence. sidefx must be pleased :)
m1sta_ 9y ago
I'd love to see unit testing and/or contracts added too. Being able to define a graph, define a requirement for a step, and then outsource development of just that step could be awesome.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  This is on our roadmap after the release, but we kindly invite you to help us design and do it the best possible way! :)
jarym 9y ago
Nice work, may want to update the copyright on the website - says 2016 still
- wdanilo 9y ago
  Thanks for catching it! We'l be releasing a new website shortly so it will be fixed soon! :)
mncharity 9y ago
> previously running on WebGL and now we base just on HTML, so it will be possible to attach any HTML Just in case anyone else faces this issue, another possibility is to do WebGL-above-HTML two-layer hybrids, with punchouts to see the synchronized HTML. But perhaps not worth the pain for 2D UIs. Hmm. Last year I half-started a quick hack of atom.io with CSS3D in Vive VR. Intended for purescript et al. But the display's angular resolution was painfully low for working with text. It looks like Luna might be an interesting alternative for exploring coding in VR. Also on my infinite todo list are exploring VR direct manipulation of a category-theoretic pushout lattice of <types,ops,laws> theories, and (separately) an interactive editor for string diagrams... Any thoughts on using Luna as a compiler target?
hutzlibu 9y ago
You said, other languages can't really directly be transformed to graphical luna nodes, can you say why? Because I gave this some thought as well and don't see why not in general, but I don't know how luna works .. or if there are some restrictions I did not encounter yet ..
- wdanilo 9y ago
  This is a really good question and to be well covered it needs a really deep answer. I will write a short draft here due to lack of the time, but will be happy to talk more about it after the release. Maybe a blog post would be suitable here, just an idea worth considering by our team :) If you are thinking about visual language you have to think about many constructions that collectively give you user experience, including available basic construction blocks (how looping, branching works etc), structures, lambdas, every language construction, how you give hints to user what is possible and what is wrong and additionally how to do this real 2 way transformation of code and graph. Luna infers types and displays colors according to them. We use algebraic data types, lazy evaluation, pattern matching and purely functional paradigm which suits graph visualization really well. We fine tune performance by allowing lazy data visualisation and many, many more things. I don't know how we can even visualize standard OO abstractions to be usable and pleasant to work in the visual form. It does NOT mean we did not think about it. We did for a long time. Sure you can utilize Luna gui to visualize anything, including python code, but it would be insanely hard to deliver similar functionalities to what Luna offers out of the box (which is available by careful design of both representations). I feel thin answer is very vague, but I hope I put a little light on how complex this task is. Did I answered your question (at last partially)?
  - hutzlibu 9y ago
    Yes, thanks, I think you did, what you can ;) I would like to try out the beta once you publish(soon?), to see more what you do and understand better (and see whether my ideas could be compatible, or not)
    - dkersten 9y ago
eiffel31 9y ago
How do you cope with syntax errors ? e.g. saving garbage tex as source code ? And reversely, can you have visual informations that can't be pretty-printed as text easily? (e.g. nodes without names) How do you expect the visual syntax to integrate with VCSs? Do you have an algorithm and UI to present visual conflicts? How is the layout after a Git merge? Cheers
niutech 9y ago
Cześć Wojtek! Congratulations on raising funds for your very promising project. I am happy that such smart concepts are being developed in Kraków, Poland. Two questions: How does Luna compare with flow-based programming model implementations such as Apache NiFi and its Expression Language or NoFlo? And do you find Luna appropriate for Internet of Things real-time data processing?

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!
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    I'm glad you like it! :)

gravypod 9y ago

What kind of plots can you make with this? This has real potential in the big-data and scientific fields. Plotting is hard and if you can easily tie together many data sources and models that are popular onto time series and geospatial plots this will be a winning combo go scientists.

wdanilo 9y ago
You can connect to our data ANY HTML/JS compatible visualisation. Moreover Luna has some basic (and they are getting better with every day) bindings to drawing over webgl canvas, so you can define visualisations using our nodes. We will be showing examples how to define efficient heatmaps / custom plots using few nodes interactively in Luna. We will be more than happy to collaborate with you and anyone interested in data visualisations soon, so lets stay in touch! :)
- gravypod 9y ago
  If you can, internally, handle adding together multiple data sources you'll win in the academic space with something like this. Especially if you can choose a Python syntax for the "code" portion. In scientific spaces you have many data sources that all mean completely different things. They are all recorded in different coordinate spaces (mag, distances, polar, etc) and you want to plot many of these things into the same plot and have them go where they were meant to be. If you could generate 3D plots as well just by flipping a switch that would be a huge plus. The hard part is that we have many modeling softwares that are written in strange ways and in strange formats. One example of a very popular model with a difficult interface is the IRI (http://irimodel.org/ http://irimodel.org/). If you could just link a node of "IRI" into "Earth Plot" then that would be awesome.

auggierose 9y ago

Sounds pretty cool. Looking forward to it. Don't rewrite the graphical interface again, though ;-)

wdanilo 9y ago
We would not rewrite anything again soon :) We decided to rewrite it because of all the gains we gather from it (including both features as well as much increased speed of development) and it already (almost) payed off.

jancsika 9y ago

How does this compare to NoFlo?

pier25 9y ago

Is this intended for a general purpose programming?

wdanilo 9y ago
Yes, it's one of our core goals! :)

z5h 9y ago

Great news! What are the hold-ups in going open source? How soon is "just before"?

wdanilo 9y ago
There are no hold-ups really. We just want to release Luna in a form when you will tell "oh, that's a cool project I would like to contribute to" rather than "interesting, let's wait until it is usable". We are right now finishing installers on all platforms, making examples and working on new website. I don't want to set a deadline, but we work hard to make it just "around the corner" and a you can see, we're almost there :)

indescions_2017 9y ago

Really cool you chose to do an image processing demo with the "color grading" example. That is such a natural fit for visual programming. I could see Luna fitting into a video post-production or digital asset creation pipeline for games. The combination of a visual interface and functional logic could be used to create mind-blowing custom procedural solutions! Have you given any thought as to what media libraries you might use for the final stage rendering of audio, video, bitmaps, 3d scenes, etc. Because I think it's possible it may be entirely done in HTML5 / JS... Keep up the good work!

CyberDildonics 9y ago
The thing there is that is already how image processing and compositing has been done for 30 years. Check out Nuke, Digital Fusion (which is free), Shake, Flame, etc.
- wdanilo 9y ago
  @CyberDildonics, I think that @indescions_2017 was referring to pipelines suitable to be run inside game engines, working at "runtime", not batch-processing data upfront. You cannot utilize any of the software you mentioned to do it. You can use Houdini engine, but it's image processing capabilities are super limited currently and even if they improve, you are limited to thinking in the context of SOPs, DOPs, CHOPs etc, without being able to extend it with custom datatypes and procedures.
  - thisjeremiah 9y ago
    TouchDesigner (https://www.derivative.ca/ https://www.derivative.ca/) or vvvv (https://vvvv.org/ https://vvvv.org/) are more comparable, since these systems DO work in realtime environments. But yeah, you still have to think in the context of SOPs, TOPs, CHOPs...
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      You cannot embed touchdesigner in a game engine (at last with ease). VVVV does not comes with abstraction over DOPs SOPs etc, but both are still very limited regarding what datatypes they can process.

seanwilson 9y ago

Can you elaborate more on the dependent type system? Is type checking decidable? What restrictions does it have to keep automatic type checking feasible?

wdanilo 9y ago
We were thinking how to answer this question yesterday, but it is just too broad and I've literally cannot afford explaining all the caveats now. I will be supper happy to talk about it after the release on Luna forum, so if we could just move it there and discuss it in some short time, I would be thankful :)
wdanilo 9y ago
We were thinking how to answer this question yesterday, but it is just too broad and I've literally cannot afford explaining all the caveats now. I will be supper happy to talk about it after the release on Luna forum, so if we could just move it there and discuss it in some short time, I would be thankful :)

kowdermeister 9y ago

How did you convince VC-s, that there's need for a new programming language? (I'm totally not saying there's no need, but since it's highly technical and I probably would fail at it I'm really curious)

wdanilo 9y ago
We are not really making a programming language. So, err.. ok, we are. But it is "just" an engine. Luna is a data processing platform. It allows you to prototype, design and deploy data processing applications much faster than it is currently possible, while working in an elegant, interactive data visualization environment. Moreover, we are supported by many cool companies that want to use Luna for their purposes, including IOT, Data Science or Bioinformatics ones. We got a really big interest in our technologies and we've collected the whole round in less than 6 weeks, choosing the investors we liked among many that wanted to contribute. I'm writing about it because I'm really very grateful for their help and super happy that the need for such development is widely recognized.
- k__ 9y ago
  Haha, I was thinking the same. Well it's not really a programming language, but a data processing platform, business people love that -> VCs love that.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    Lets underline one important thing. Luna really is nut just a language, it really is a data processing / visualization platform! :D
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  Thanks for the response, it makes more sense now. However your site does say it's "just" a programming language with huge font size :) You might want to add what you just posted, there's nothing wrong with it, but it would make more people to get it IMHO.

xor1 9y ago

I really like how the Luna site looks. As someone who knows nothing about web front-end, how was it made? Custom-built? Template?

wdanilo 9y ago
Our programmer designed it and we've just build it using some standard bootstrap. It might seem like a joke, but it's currently not :D
- xor1 9y ago
  Ahh, I actually really like it alot!
  - waterpowder 9y ago
    http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ie/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ie/2010/04/alot-is-better-...
    - wdanilo 9y ago
      thanks alot! :D
- mkl 9y ago
  You might want to adjust the colours, and look at it on a few more screens. The medium grey on dark grey is pretty unreadable - the only reason I didn't close the page immediately is the number of upvotes it got on HN.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    Would it help if we put a button "high-contrast"? On vast majority of displays the website looks well balanced and not eye-burning, but of course it does not cover older displays, displays that are dimmed or used in heavy lighting. Would such button solve your problems or do you think we should just strongly re-consider how we present everything?

bluetwo 9y ago

I'm interested in seeing how an open source programming language/platform with a clean GUI will evolve. Curious to see this in a year!

wdanilo 9y ago
We are also super curious and we hope it will shine. If you hope for it too, let's contribute! We'd love to work with you to polish it as much as possible! :)
- jamiek88 9y ago
  Is there a way for a beginning developer to help? Maybe with documentation? I could at least help with editing / proof reading and the drudge work you guys are too talented to be doing! Your time is much better spent on the core development.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    There is always a way to help and we are very grateful for helping us. It means a lot to me. But please, do not treat us like "too talented to do something". I feel just wrong then :) Drop me a line at wojciech at luna-lang.org and we could work something out :) I do not promise we will be able to collaborate before the release (we've got our hands full of work and we're hardly sleeping in nights now), but in the early days / moths after the release the help would be much needed and we would love to build community around people as passionate as you are! Thank you! :)

shalabhc 9y ago

Ah - great to hear you're open sourcing it because I was a bit put off by 'sign up to be selected' form, even though the product is fascinating.

wdanilo 9y ago
Sorry for putting off. I will explain that a little bit - we want to build community around people which are active, passionate and determined enough to fill such a form. I understand why it could be perceived negatively, sorry for that! :)
- shalabhc 9y ago
  But without giving access, how can you expect passion? :-) Let everyone check it out, the passionate ones will engage more through any channels you have (mailing lists, chat, twitter) and be easy to find, IMO.
  - crawfordcomeaux 9y ago
    I don't disagree with you, though don't necessarily agree, either because I don't know that passionate people are communicative people. I know many passionate people, myself included, who've been known to be rather introverted. After reading some of their comments & the copy on their homepage, the creators of Luna sound like they could be fairly mindful people. I'm betting they're seeking people who enshrine certain values to seed their community with & want to privately establish a relationship with them. I find this approach appealing to my introverted side, as a result. The next mindful step would be to open things up to everyone immediately to allow the ensuing flood of extroverts & introverts alike. This approach seems like it could counter starting off with winner-take-all mechanics in the community's culture. Then again, all I know about the product is from the first bits of text on their site & this post. I didn't know they weren't simply allowing everyone in until this thread. I could be totally off on how they're rolling. If I am, I'll have to take some time to examine my confirmation biases.
    - 9y ago

akavel 9y ago

Wouldn't it be trouble if I tried to visit you at your office tomorrow? :) Not sure if time (and traffic) will let me, but I'm in the same city, and super interested in your project... would love to talk some... note: not an investor in any way, sorry ;) but I wanted to build something similar in some ways, and now have high hopes that maybe I won't have to, maybe I'll be just able to build on it/extend it! If you're ok, what time would be cool for you?

wdanilo 9y ago
Sure, it's a super cool idea. Let's drop me an email to wojciech at luna-lang.org and we set all the details (time / place etc) - we've got a parking place here, but its "hidden" so if you will be driving car, you can park here without problems! :) We are not looking for any investments now but we are looking to collaborate with everyone interested in Luna, so that sounds like a "perfect match" for us! :D
- akavel 9y ago
  Sent! Please check your spam folder ;) Also copied to the address from your website, or are both correct?
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    I've got it and just replied. See you tomorrow! :)

spuz 9y ago

What is the largest program written in Luna? How does Luna compare with other mainstream programming languages for complex applications such as compilers, browsers and web applications?

kustosz 9y ago
The standard library is 3-ish kLOCs (written entirely in Luna) and growing, the biggest use cases we've created so far were around 500 LOCs. Performance-wise, we are letting the GHC compiler infrastructure do most of the heavy lifting. As for the more complex applications, it may be tricky to create a compiler or a web browser in Luna in its current state, but we are constantly working on on improving the performance, with the goal to match Haskell's. Web applications (particularly microservices) are among our main focuses now, so that's entirely within our reach.

quadcore 9y ago

Im just wondering what's the purpose of the language itself. Ideally you would like to use the programming language you want and still have the visualisation stuff.

shmolyneaux 9y ago

Very cool project! What license are you planning on using?

wdanilo 9y ago
We are considering MIT or Apache v2, what do you recommend?
- spot 9y ago
  apache2 because of the patent protections.
  - delhanty 9y ago
    Straight question for the uninformed (me): Could you (or anyone else) elaborate on MIT vs Apache V2 and patent protection?
    - delhanty 9y ago
      OK - found this on Quora [1] that gave me some idea. I asked before as googling because there are often very well-informed software legal opinions on HN. [1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-different-between-Apache-v2-0-and-MIT-license https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-different-between-Apache-v2-...

dgreensp 9y ago

Can I implement pixel-level video effects with Luna (e.g. warping, time map, segmentation, keying, etc.)?

wdanilo 9y ago
Sure! Is webgl good enough for you? If so, I will prepare an example and include it in the official release. If you need more "standard" GPU power, then it will be possible, but a little bit hackish on the beginning (we don't have libraries for it yet and you will need to connect to other language to keep the performance. We will support language interoperability, but in the first reelease it will be hackish. Still if you'll need it, I'll show you how to do it) :)
- dgreensp 9y ago
  Thanks for the reply! So do you have first-class support for video as well as images? It seems like to have fun with video editing in Luna, you'd need to have built-in support for videos an inputs and outputs, and have a way to play the video output on the screen, and maybe scrub through it, and at a minimum be able to run shaders on the "current frame" and export the resulting video out. The next level after that would be being able to load multiple frames into memory at the same time, and being able to do a combination of "offline" and "online" processing with some CPU involvement (e.g. calculating a motion track and storing it, or applying a filter that can't be expressed as a pure shader program). I don't know enough about Luna yet to know what code to do these things would "look" like on the visual side, or come to think of it where the computation is being performed (in the browser?). Much more to learn, but the project looks great, a sort of "holy grail" in a way.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    Hi! Thank you for such great description of the process. In fact I know it well, I originate from the same domain - i was working for few years as FX TD :) You can think of Luna just like about a general purpose programming language. You can define your own types and you can even define how to decode bits from binary files to your structures. The GUI runs in HTML, so you can utilize any html component to display output. Definitely, your use case is doeable, however the amount of libraries currently available is very, very low, so it will need some love :) Did I answered your questions? :)

amrrs 9y ago

When you're talking about building a community, I'm wondering how are you going to convince Data Scientists who are pretty much used to R and Python and not any functional programming language, try Luna? Any plans for it? Like a free course on Udemy or any mooc to take this to masses?

wdanilo 9y ago
We are open to suggestions here. We know that Luna brings a great power to Data Scientists but there have to be a good way to show this power to them. I don't know currently what way would be the best and we've got a little time until we do it. For now, the first milestone for us is to build community around good programmers (including good programmers from the data science field) and later target less technical people. Any suggestions however, are very important to us!
- marmaduke 9y ago
  I'd be interested in (and have some experience) in bridging Python with other (data-heavy) languages, which would let you pull in a lot of functionality as nodes in your graph, or expose your graph as functions in Python.
  - wdanilo 9y ago
    Great! I'd like to help make it happen. Please sign to our list and make sure you read mails from spam folder. Let's be in touch after the release, soon. Alternatively, just drop me a line at wojciech at luna-lang.org and let's stay in touch! :)
- crowaycrestcan 9y ago
  The power of e.g. matlab for engineering disciplines is in the profound library. The optimized performance of the core language not withstanding, optimizing the library takes many people, often enough graduates, doctorates and professors.
malberto 9y ago
No gil. Draw your own neural network, pipeline or graphical model in an idiomatic way. If you can display profiling data on top of the code visualization you can go faster toward optimizing the most time consuming parts of your code. For a data scientist all this is gold.

imhoguy 9y ago

One click deployment example to AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions could be killer scenario!

wdanilo 9y ago
This is what we want to deliver a little bit later. So you could go to our website, click "start", make the graph and everything will be run and scaled automatically for you, delivering you the results. Are we talking about the same functionality? (I'm abstracting over particular hardware provider).
- hustlechris 9y ago
  1 click deployment to something like golem.network would be even cooler
  - kustosz 9y ago
    Interesting idea! Are you thinking about any specific applications you'd like to deploy there? I'd love to learn more

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bobwaycott 9y ago

This really looks fantastic, and I'd love to give it a spin. I could see this being pretty awesome to both use myself on projects, and with people I spend time with helping them learn to develop serious applications. Looking forward to see where Luna goes. Congrats on a great-looking product!

wdanilo 9y ago
Bob I'm happy you like it! We'd love to hear your feedback after your tests :)

yellowapple 9y ago

"we are just before releasing Luna as an Open Source project!" Is there a particular timeline on that? I'd love to see how this is implemented (and - importantly - whether or not this can easily be integrated into other software).

wdanilo 9y ago
We are right now finishing installers on all platforms, making examples and working on new website. I don't want to set a deadline, but we work hard to make it just "around the corner" and a you can see, we're almost there :)

agumonkey 9y ago

inspirations please ? brett victor ? dataflow / node based modeling ? others ?

wdanilo 9y ago
Houdini, Haskell, Python, Ruby, MaxMSP. I think these were the strongest influencers.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  I can finally say Houdini is a PL influence. sidefx must be pleased :)

m1sta_ 9y ago

I'd love to see unit testing and/or contracts added too. Being able to define a graph, define a requirement for a step, and then outsource development of just that step could be awesome.

wdanilo 9y ago
This is on our roadmap after the release, but we kindly invite you to help us design and do it the best possible way! :)

jarym 9y ago

wdanilo 9y ago
Thanks for catching it! We'l be releasing a new website shortly so it will be fixed soon! :)

mncharity 9y ago

> previously running on WebGL and now we base just on HTML, so it will be possible to attach any HTML Just in case anyone else faces this issue, another possibility is to do WebGL-above-HTML two-layer hybrids, with punchouts to see the synchronized HTML. But perhaps not worth the pain for 2D UIs. Hmm. Last year I half-started a quick hack of atom.io with CSS3D in Vive VR. Intended for purescript et al. But the display's angular resolution was painfully low for working with text. It looks like Luna might be an interesting alternative for exploring coding in VR. Also on my infinite todo list are exploring VR direct manipulation of a category-theoretic pushout lattice of <types,ops,laws> theories, and (separately) an interactive editor for string diagrams... Any thoughts on using Luna as a compiler target?

hutzlibu 9y ago

You said, other languages can't really directly be transformed to graphical luna nodes, can you say why? Because I gave this some thought as well and don't see why not in general, but I don't know how luna works .. or if there are some restrictions I did not encounter yet ..

wdanilo 9y ago
This is a really good question and to be well covered it needs a really deep answer. I will write a short draft here due to lack of the time, but will be happy to talk more about it after the release. Maybe a blog post would be suitable here, just an idea worth considering by our team :) If you are thinking about visual language you have to think about many constructions that collectively give you user experience, including available basic construction blocks (how looping, branching works etc), structures, lambdas, every language construction, how you give hints to user what is possible and what is wrong and additionally how to do this real 2 way transformation of code and graph. Luna infers types and displays colors according to them. We use algebraic data types, lazy evaluation, pattern matching and purely functional paradigm which suits graph visualization really well. We fine tune performance by allowing lazy data visualisation and many, many more things. I don't know how we can even visualize standard OO abstractions to be usable and pleasant to work in the visual form. It does NOT mean we did not think about it. We did for a long time. Sure you can utilize Luna gui to visualize anything, including python code, but it would be insanely hard to deliver similar functionalities to what Luna offers out of the box (which is available by careful design of both representations). I feel thin answer is very vague, but I hope I put a little light on how complex this task is. Did I answered your question (at last partially)?
- hutzlibu 9y ago
  Yes, thanks, I think you did, what you can ;) I would like to try out the beta once you publish(soon?), to see more what you do and understand better (and see whether my ideas could be compatible, or not)
  - dkersten 9y ago

eiffel31 9y ago

How do you cope with syntax errors ? e.g. saving garbage tex as source code ? And reversely, can you have visual informations that can't be pretty-printed as text easily? (e.g. nodes without names) How do you expect the visual syntax to integrate with VCSs? Do you have an algorithm and UI to present visual conflicts? How is the layout after a Git merge? Cheers

niutech 9y ago

Cześć Wojtek! Congratulations on raising funds for your very promising project. I am happy that such smart concepts are being developed in Kraków, Poland. Two questions: How does Luna compare with flow-based programming model implementations such as Apache NiFi and its Expression Language or NoFlo? And do you find Luna appropriate for Internet of Things real-time data processing?