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I love the typography and the quality of the presentation layer of this. I love how the text ("docs/comments") seems interspersed with the code. Kinda makes it
by akavel 8y ago
I love the typography and the quality of the presentation layer of this. I love how the text ("docs/comments") seems interspersed with the code. Kinda makes it feel like a paper about an algorithm, with diagrams that are live — but it actually is an implementation of the algorithm at the same time. Reminds me of Jupyter Notebooks in this regard. I hope embedded math is/will be possible, and also "inline comments" (though maybe making smaller functions when a detailed comment is needed might be just enough).
I love how the author explicitly mentions a lot of related work (esp. the new one like Luna, Apparatus, but also the classics, LabVIEW etc.), and tries to explain important differences.
One thing I feel I miss is that the same input nodes are not merged (with forking lines), but they're duplicated instead. Seems to make it harder to understand/notice where the data is coming from, that some of it has common origin. In other words: "merging" seems to be visible, but "forking" seems not so. As an idea: maybe a set of vertical lines representing "connection/input planes" (like "ground plane" in a breadboard) could be shown on the left (for passive but somewhat messy viewing), and then clicking on a node could make one vertical line thicker, highlighting all the flows that start from this input (for cleaner but active viewing)?
I haven't tried the demo, so I'm curious about a few more things at the moment:
- how well does it handle slow functions? (e.g. does it hang, or does it allow working during computation and slowly propagates the results through the graph) how well does it handle bigger data sets? (lists with hundreds, thousands, millions of elements...) complex composite data structures? (trees, graphs, ...)
- does it allow "export/compile to JS" for easy running of the code built with it in "production"? also does it maybe allow "import/decompile from JS"?
- chrispsn 8y agoIf you need "export to JS" in a similar app, you might like Mesh Spreadsheets: http://www.mesh-spreadsheet.com http://www.mesh-spreadsheet.com Slow functions and trees/graphs are currently a problem with Mesh as well, but timeouts may take care of the former, and we're thinking about the latter: https://twitter.com/MeshSpreadsheet/status/1079480449313820672 https://twitter.com/MeshSpreadsheet/status/10794804493138206...
- eggy 8y agoI had not seen Mesh-Spreadsheets before, thanks! I was using Excel with F#, however, the portability and ubiquity of this is very enticing.