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It's great to see Idyll pop up on HN. I'm the creator of the project and have been working on it as part of my PhD research at the University of Washington. We

It's great to see Idyll pop up on HN. I'm the creator of the project and have been working on it as part of my PhD research at the University of Washington. We've had a busy year, including receiving a donation from Albert Wenger [1], which is being used to hire another developer to work on the project. Feel free to ask any questions in this thread and I'll do my best to provide thoughtful responses. [1] http://continuations.com/post/166234021110/support-idyll-interactive-narratives http://continuations.com/post/166234021110/support-idyll-int...

anigbrowl 9y ago
Not only is the tool awesome, so is the documentation and presentation. 10/10 (from someone who likes to complain).
z1mm32m4n 9y ago
This library looks really cool! Frequently I'll have a data set (list of transactions over time, log of analytics events to a site, etc.) that I want to visualize. It usually involves slicing the data in multiple ways with a handful of queries. It'd be really cool if I could load up a CSV file / SQLite database per document and embed charts that visualize queries on that data. The goal would be to keep the data, visualizations, and text as close together as possible. Short of this feature being available, I can only do something like: - write some SQLite queries - write a quick script to run each query, and save the results to a file (CSV/JSON) - reference each individual file from the Idyll document Again, really cool project!
- garyclarke27 9y ago
  Agreed ‘out of the box’ sql data source (postgres for me) would be a killer feature to add. SQL is just text, but amazingly powerful and a million times more useful than a file reference.
  - mathisonian 9y ago
    Agreed that this would be really nice to have! We are working on a compile-time plugin system, so it should be possible to setup something the executes embedded SQL at compile time to allow generation of more dynamic documents.
- shalabhc 9y ago
  Also see thegamma.net. Might be closer to what you want.
akud 9y ago
I've been working on a similar project in my spare time to create tools for interactive technical blogs [1]. It's funny, in the past day I've seen two projects that I would say have the same goals as me, idyll being one of them. What are the possibilities around contributing to idyll? Building on top of it? Is it as simple as writing my own components? I'm specifically interested in uis to define data structures. One of the more annoying things I found working with d3 to create graphs (as in graph theory) was defining the graphs procedurally, so I built a ui to define graphs graphically. [1] https://akud.github.io/visualization-blogs/index.html https://akud.github.io/visualization-blogs/index.html
- mathisonian 9y ago
  Hey Akud, I'd love to talk more about possible ways to collaborate. Adding components that help interface with other libraries are a great way to contribute. For example, the recent integration with Apparatus [1]. Feel free to jump in our chat [2] or shoot me an email [3] and we can talk more. [1] https://mathisonian.com/writing/apparatus https://mathisonian.com/writing/apparatus [2] https://gitter.im/idyll-lang/Lobby https://gitter.im/idyll-lang/Lobby [3] <anything> at mathisonian dot com

anigbrowl 9y ago

Not only is the tool awesome, so is the documentation and presentation. 10/10 (from someone who likes to complain).

z1mm32m4n 9y ago

This library looks really cool! Frequently I'll have a data set (list of transactions over time, log of analytics events to a site, etc.) that I want to visualize. It usually involves slicing the data in multiple ways with a handful of queries. It'd be really cool if I could load up a CSV file / SQLite database per document and embed charts that visualize queries on that data. The goal would be to keep the data, visualizations, and text as close together as possible. Short of this feature being available, I can only do something like: - write some SQLite queries - write a quick script to run each query, and save the results to a file (CSV/JSON) - reference each individual file from the Idyll document Again, really cool project!

garyclarke27 9y ago
Agreed ‘out of the box’ sql data source (postgres for me) would be a killer feature to add. SQL is just text, but amazingly powerful and a million times more useful than a file reference.
- mathisonian 9y ago
  Agreed that this would be really nice to have! We are working on a compile-time plugin system, so it should be possible to setup something the executes embedded SQL at compile time to allow generation of more dynamic documents.
shalabhc 9y ago
Also see thegamma.net. Might be closer to what you want.

akud 9y ago

I've been working on a similar project in my spare time to create tools for interactive technical blogs [1]. It's funny, in the past day I've seen two projects that I would say have the same goals as me, idyll being one of them. What are the possibilities around contributing to idyll? Building on top of it? Is it as simple as writing my own components? I'm specifically interested in uis to define data structures. One of the more annoying things I found working with d3 to create graphs (as in graph theory) was defining the graphs procedurally, so I built a ui to define graphs graphically. [1] https://akud.github.io/visualization-blogs/index.html https://akud.github.io/visualization-blogs/index.html

mathisonian 9y ago
Hey Akud, I'd love to talk more about possible ways to collaborate. Adding components that help interface with other libraries are a great way to contribute. For example, the recent integration with Apparatus [1]. Feel free to jump in our chat [2] or shoot me an email [3] and we can talk more. [1] https://mathisonian.com/writing/apparatus https://mathisonian.com/writing/apparatus [2] https://gitter.im/idyll-lang/Lobby https://gitter.im/idyll-lang/Lobby [3] <anything> at mathisonian dot com