9 ms·

Luna – A WYSIWYG language for data processing

296 points by tillulen 7y ago

ebg13 7y ago
I find the writing style on the site and in the docs to be extremely verbose. My kingdom for some up-front concrete data examples without having to wade through an essay.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  I don't think English is their native language. They should probably hire a tech writer. Also, tutorials and examples are the Achilles' heels of GUIs. I remember back in the 1990s when you'd go to a bookstore and find 1200 page tomes full of screenshots that would tell you how to do everything in Word 95. Something that is "just run this script" in a CLI is a 20-page checklist with screenshots with a GUI.
jordache 7y ago
Looks interesting. Then I saw the data collection disclaimer during the install wizard. Deleted it in a instant. You lose many potential clients just for that alone
- kreetx 7y ago
  What did it say?
- rygxqpbsngav 7y ago
  Is this what you are referring to? https://luna-lang.org/alpha-data.html https://luna-lang.org/alpha-data.html
  - jordache 7y ago
    That page's disclaimer makes it look a bit more benign. THe install wizard's disclaimer did not show the bullet list.
    - SamBam 7y ago
      They should put in an opt-out checkbox. Many people are happy to give small orgs basic usage data to help them improve their product, but most people don't want it forced on them.
skohan 7y ago
Pretty nice looking website. Smoother performance than most pages with "fancy scrolling" I often see.
- Cilvic 7y ago
  Only nit bit from me is that the animations are playing a bit too fast to follow along what's happening. Maybe that's intentional to "tease"? I would want to slow them down a bit. Would be great to just hit "Enter sandbox" or "demo" or see a tutorial without the download.
lloeki 7y ago
Very cool. Makes me think of Bret Victor's work. http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction This is the kind of visual programming I'd be ready to buy into.
holtalanm 7y ago
this has been posted on HN at least 4 other times in the past three years. still interesting, but i don't do much data science, so will probably never get a chance to use this.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Maybe you're interested in movies then? As far as I remember the history correctly, Luna is a spin-off project from Flowbox development - https://flowbox.io/ https://flowbox.io/.
jgtrosh 7y ago
> Luna is the world’s first programming language featuring two equivalent syntax representations, visual and textual. Is this true? This is not my strong domain but I'm sure there are such programming languages.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  I guess this hinges on exactly what meaning is hidden in the word "equivalent", I could imagine that a very tight coupling of text and visual forms would be novel.
  - hjek 7y ago
    Yes, exactly. Depending on the definition of "equivalent", Puredata[0] may or may not qualify as well. [0]: https://puredata.info/ https://puredata.info/
    - worldsayshi 7y ago
      Does Pd have a textual representation intended to be human readable?
      - jazzyjackson 7y ago
        Everything is saved as plaintext, but it is not meant to be readable really. here's an excerpt from some of my code. #N canvas 340 73 884 380 10; #N canvas 0 0 1362 686 sendchord 0; #X msg 241 135 60; #X msg 240 167 64; #X msg 241 200 67; #X obj 191 173 bng 15 250 50 0 empty empty empty 17 7 0 10 -262144 -1 -1; #X obj 283 450 bng 15 250 50 0 empty empty empty 17 7 0 10 -262144 -1 -1;
        hjek 7y ago
        Hello world in Pd: #N canvas 0 0 100 100 100 10; #X obj 0 40 print; #X msg 0 20 hello world; #X obj 0 0 loadbang; #X connect 1 0 0 0; #X connect 2 0 1 0; Compared to Hello World in Java, it's actually not that unreadable IMO.
tyleo 7y ago
Luna looks great. I've been doing work in this area myself and hope to launch my own visual programming environment next month or so: https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t Unlike Luna though, my own environment does not have a dual-syntax representation. It can import functions from TypeScript though and export them as nodes. I also plan to target build tools rather than data processing. I'm excited to see so much progress being made in this area. Two other examples are NoFlo (https://noflojs.org/ https://noflojs.org/) and Flolab (http://flowlab.io/ http://flowlab.io/).
- nikofeyn 7y ago
  everybody always seems to ignore the most advanced and general purpose visual programming language/environment, that being labview. i suppose it is probably because it sits behind an expensive license.
  - NotPhysicsPhd 7y ago
    I would add that not only the license is quite expensive, but it has a confusing "syntax" that most often than not results in unmaintanable software.
    - nikofeyn 7y ago
      > it has a confusing "syntax" that most often than not results in unmaintanable software that is more that most people who program it don't put in the time or effort to program it in a professional way. personally, i do and was trained by people who did and do, and so i have seriously complex systems built out of it that are far more maintainable than other people's systems built out of python and c/c++, which are the unfortunately choices for system development where i have worked. the point is, just like with any language, you have to settle on the (or an) idiomatic way of working in the language, and you have to be disciplined to develop modular, decoupled code. once you do so, i find that labview's dataflow paradigm actually makes it easier than most languages to develop dependable, robust, and maintainable code. the reasons that people like functional programming languages with immutability apply to labview. people writing unmaintainable software in labview is a symptom of the people and not the language. every time labview is brought up in meetings as the target language, there is often a gut reaction by people, but to be frank, those people actually know very little of the labview language, have never used its OOP features, are not even aware of its debugging capabilities and tools, and thus, their opinion is moot. just because someone used labview in college in a trivial way but didn't like it doesn't give them a professional voice with regard to labview. all they usually want to do is develop unreliable systems using c/c++ or python because that's the "hardcore" way of doing things. and yet, it's those projects that are often pining for help in the end when things aren't working. so yes, labview is different, but if you treat it differently, it can greatly increase your efficiency and ability to quickly turn around robust systems. i develop systems in time units of months, not years, and my software is well known to just work. what would you say the "confusing syntax" is that leads to unmaintainable software?
deforciant 7y ago
I have been successfully using Node-RED for quite some time now (https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/) :) really like it so far, great tool to quickly add simple and complex health checks to your systems and automate various tasks that no necessarily deserve to have their own services. Kinda like your own FaaS platform (mine runs on an Intel NUC). Luna looks great and I actually think I initially saw it and then I was looking for it but couldn't find it, ending up with Node-RED. I might give it a try, however I didn't see any mentions of how it integrates with Git :/
- d21d3q 7y ago
  > I might give it a try, however I didn't see any mentions of how it integrates with Git :/ Like this: [https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/projects/ https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/projects/]
itodd 7y ago
This looks interesting and I tried to play with it but the colors are so dark and everything is hard to see.
- stevenpetryk 7y ago
  I sound like a broken record but accessibility makes sites better for everyone, not just disabled people!
  - rofrol 7y ago
    dark background is bad for eyes
    - blunte 7y ago
      For working late at night with low ambient light, "dark mode" styles are not so bad. But in normal daylight, or worse - outside - dark mode UIs are terrible. It's a fad that I wish would stop propagating.
PaulHoule 7y ago
There are quite a few "boxes and lines" tools out there such as Alteryx, Actian, LabView, KNIME, etc. Many people swear by them. I like that Luna has a text syntax. I also like that Luna supports building graph functional blocks that can be nested inside other graphs. That's a missing link in other tools of this type that limits the scale of what you can do with them. I'd like to see a tool like this which has something like a JSON document going over the lines, but that might be asking too much. If the objects going over the lines are basically relational rows you can do columnar execution at very high speed. The Actian people have looked at alternatives to what they do, but I think they haven't extended the data model past relational because they couldn't get it fast enough to compete with their own product. (e.g. a classic "disruptive technology")
- Retra 7y ago
  I don't know... I look at this and I just see an alternative front-end for a spreadsheet program.
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    Spread sheet programs are functional languages. Luna looks to be a functional language, hence the similarity. Spread sheet programs just have a bad rap of being used by non-programmers, and limited functionality outside of the spreadsheet universe. Ignoring the caveats mentioned, the principles of spreadsheet programming are programmatically sound. Spreadsheet programmers are functional programmers.
    - PaulHoule 7y ago
      More to the point, execution of a spreadsheet does not progress in one particular direction, rather when you update the data the engine can figure out what cells are affected by the change. Business rules engines work in a similar way, Prolog works in the exact opposite direction. The trouble w/ spreadsheets I think is organizational. Some things are an exact match for the 2-d grid, other things (say you fill out 5 numeric fields and then calculate with scalar formulas to produce a similar dimensional output) are easy to express with it (even if tk/solver is a better fit.) Then you rapidly go over a cliff where you don't have the organizational tools to handle it -- tuple and set values programming (eg. Matlab, Sql) is one answer, object oriented is another.
LudwigNagasena 7y ago
How is it different from other ETL tools?
daemonk 7y ago
Does it support any kind of HPC job launching feature?
badsavage 7y ago
Pretty cool
JaimeThompson 7y ago
How does Luna make money? I am worried about the possibility of features being moved behind a paid version after people are tied to the product.
- maxyme 7y ago
  They posted about this on HN before, basically they are VC funded and would like to make their money back by providing community support and paid features. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14613264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14613264
agentofuser 7y ago
Neat! Anyone with more understanding can point out differences with statebox[1]? Both seem to be: - visual and textual - purely functional - dataflow-like I get the feeling that statebox might not be turing complete (guaranteed termination) and have a stronger focus on formal verification. Also, it doesn't seem to have a visual editor yet. [1]: https://statebox.org/what-is/ https://statebox.org/what-is/
- wires 7y ago
  hi, I know Statebox pretty well :) Luna not super well, but I did beta test their first release (and some later versions), cool stuff. Anyway, the two are (feature wise) very similar, as you noted: - both have textual/visual representations, - are typed FP languages, - access to FFI/effects, - diagram nesting But Statebox is _not_ data-flow, it's more about "control flow" or "multi-party protocol execution". (You could do data-flow with Statebox, but at the moment that's prohibitively inefficient.) Where Statebox takes a different direction (I think) is in basing the language on established concepts from category theory and focussing on 'generality/compositionality' ; specifically, our diagrams are not "graphs", but (morphisms in) categories. This difference is very very subtle, in fact, seems totally irrelevant if you want to visual programming (see the nice codex, clearly it works using graphs!) but it becomes more important when you want to diagram's to be "universal". at least in principle, the Statebox language should naturally and compositionally translate to any kind of hardware ; we want you to be able to program smart contracts, p2p-systems, JS frontends, digital circuits, heck, maybe even slime molds, all from the same diagram. Luna certainly has more features at this stage. (also, our editor is under heavy development and not yet published, we are aiming to release some things around the statebox summit in september) Maybe it's fair to say: Luna is like a better NodeRED, Statebox is conceptually closer to something like homotopy.io / globular.science ? Hope this clears things up a bit
spiralganglion 7y ago
Plug — for anyone researching or otherwise interested in visual languages like Luna, I keep a collection of projects, papers, talks, references, and other related media here on Github: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex As for Luna, it seems like they've gone quiet for the past while, though I believe they're still hard at work on the project. Hopefully they can improve the stability and performance of the program, because to date I've found it almost unusable. For a similarly interesting project (albeit not visual in the same way), I recommend people also take a look a isomorƒ: https://isomorf.io https://isomorf.io
- breck 7y ago
  Wow, thanks for putting that together. I think this is the best list of visual programming tools I've seen to date. Very easy to scan with the images in there.
  - wiz21c 7y ago
    yeah, the list is very interesting to read. The screenshots are a plus !
  - spiralganglion 7y ago
    Thanks! Gradually adding more screenshots whenever I get the time. Glad to know the format works well for you.
- mottosso 7y ago
  I love these. Here's one more: http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarmming-languages-snapshots/ http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarm...
  - spiralganglion 7y ago
    You'll find that link, and a few other great ones like it, on the "Reflections" page of my codex: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/master/reflections.md https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/m... My favourite is the "Gallery of Programmer Interfaces" by Jonathan Edwards: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bEgysfDmb8PDV6iCAjH5JIvaI/preview https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE... I can also heartily recommend following Edwards on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathoda https://twitter.com/jonathoda
ComodoHacker 7y ago
>WYSIWYG language Please, let's refrain from such awkward terminology. "Graphic language", "visual language" are fine. "WYSIWYG data processing" is okay. But let's not forget any graphic syntax is an abstraction.
- DonaldFisk 7y ago
  An abstraction of what? If the paradigm is dataflow - i.e. capable of running directly on (hypothetical) dataflow hardware - a graphical representation is more natural than a textual one.
- pierrec 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure how the term applies here. If you're using Luna to make a program that generates output, "what you see" (the node graph) is definitely not "what you get" (the output). Maybe you can have an inline preview, but it's not what you're editing. WYSIWYG describes domain-specific tools that let you manipulate the final product directly (or a draft of it), without having to look at any kind of source, be it a node graph or source code.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
I didn't take a look deeply but that graph looks like function composition. Looks like luna is a functional programming language.
pankajdoharey 7y ago
I've seen it so many times on HN, i wonder if anyone uses it in production?
DonaldFisk 7y ago
It would have been a good idea to contact the developers before posting a link to their project, to involve them in the discussion, and allow them to clear up any misunderstandings about their work.
wut42 7y ago
The discord widget that eats part of the screen on mobile is very annoying - besides the fact that another OSS project is using proprietary communications systems.
didibus 7y ago
I think the question I've always had with these visual languages is if they target user friendliness and ease of use in the hope that non-programmers can use them? Or do they actually think it'll be more productive for professional programmers than text based languages? I think for the latter, it'll be really really difficult to achieve. I can maybe see the former, but I also worry for the former, these are too general, and domain specific graphical tools will always dominate.

296 points by tillulen 7y ago

I find the writing style on the site and in the docs to be extremely verbose. My kingdom for some up-front concrete data examples without having to wade through an essay.

PaulHoule 7y ago
I don't think English is their native language. They should probably hire a tech writer. Also, tutorials and examples are the Achilles' heels of GUIs. I remember back in the 1990s when you'd go to a bookstore and find 1200 page tomes full of screenshots that would tell you how to do everything in Word 95. Something that is "just run this script" in a CLI is a 20-page checklist with screenshots with a GUI.

jordache 7y ago

Looks interesting. Then I saw the data collection disclaimer during the install wizard. Deleted it in a instant. You lose many potential clients just for that alone

kreetx 7y ago
What did it say?
rygxqpbsngav 7y ago
Is this what you are referring to? https://luna-lang.org/alpha-data.html https://luna-lang.org/alpha-data.html
- jordache 7y ago
  That page's disclaimer makes it look a bit more benign. THe install wizard's disclaimer did not show the bullet list.
  - SamBam 7y ago
    They should put in an opt-out checkbox. Many people are happy to give small orgs basic usage data to help them improve their product, but most people don't want it forced on them.

skohan 7y ago

Pretty nice looking website. Smoother performance than most pages with "fancy scrolling" I often see.

Cilvic 7y ago
Only nit bit from me is that the animations are playing a bit too fast to follow along what's happening. Maybe that's intentional to "tease"? I would want to slow them down a bit. Would be great to just hit "Enter sandbox" or "demo" or see a tutorial without the download.

lloeki 7y ago

Very cool. Makes me think of Bret Victor's work. http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction This is the kind of visual programming I'd be ready to buy into.

holtalanm 7y ago

this has been posted on HN at least 4 other times in the past three years. still interesting, but i don't do much data science, so will probably never get a chance to use this.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Maybe you're interested in movies then? As far as I remember the history correctly, Luna is a spin-off project from Flowbox development - https://flowbox.io/ https://flowbox.io/.

jgtrosh 7y ago

> Luna is the world’s first programming language featuring two equivalent syntax representations, visual and textual. Is this true? This is not my strong domain but I'm sure there are such programming languages.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
I guess this hinges on exactly what meaning is hidden in the word "equivalent", I could imagine that a very tight coupling of text and visual forms would be novel.
- hjek 7y ago
  Yes, exactly. Depending on the definition of "equivalent", Puredata[0] may or may not qualify as well. [0]: https://puredata.info/ https://puredata.info/
  - worldsayshi 7y ago
    Does Pd have a textual representation intended to be human readable?
    - jazzyjackson 7y ago
      Everything is saved as plaintext, but it is not meant to be readable really. here's an excerpt from some of my code. #N canvas 340 73 884 380 10; #N canvas 0 0 1362 686 sendchord 0; #X msg 241 135 60; #X msg 240 167 64; #X msg 241 200 67; #X obj 191 173 bng 15 250 50 0 empty empty empty 17 7 0 10 -262144 -1 -1; #X obj 283 450 bng 15 250 50 0 empty empty empty 17 7 0 10 -262144 -1 -1;
      - hjek 7y ago
        Hello world in Pd: #N canvas 0 0 100 100 100 10; #X obj 0 40 print; #X msg 0 20 hello world; #X obj 0 0 loadbang; #X connect 1 0 0 0; #X connect 2 0 1 0; Compared to Hello World in Java, it's actually not that unreadable IMO.

tyleo 7y ago

Luna looks great. I've been doing work in this area myself and hope to launch my own visual programming environment next month or so: https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t Unlike Luna though, my own environment does not have a dual-syntax representation. It can import functions from TypeScript though and export them as nodes. I also plan to target build tools rather than data processing. I'm excited to see so much progress being made in this area. Two other examples are NoFlo (https://noflojs.org/ https://noflojs.org/) and Flolab (http://flowlab.io/ http://flowlab.io/).

nikofeyn 7y ago
everybody always seems to ignore the most advanced and general purpose visual programming language/environment, that being labview. i suppose it is probably because it sits behind an expensive license.
- NotPhysicsPhd 7y ago
  I would add that not only the license is quite expensive, but it has a confusing "syntax" that most often than not results in unmaintanable software.
  - nikofeyn 7y ago
    > it has a confusing "syntax" that most often than not results in unmaintanable software that is more that most people who program it don't put in the time or effort to program it in a professional way. personally, i do and was trained by people who did and do, and so i have seriously complex systems built out of it that are far more maintainable than other people's systems built out of python and c/c++, which are the unfortunately choices for system development where i have worked. the point is, just like with any language, you have to settle on the (or an) idiomatic way of working in the language, and you have to be disciplined to develop modular, decoupled code. once you do so, i find that labview's dataflow paradigm actually makes it easier than most languages to develop dependable, robust, and maintainable code. the reasons that people like functional programming languages with immutability apply to labview. people writing unmaintainable software in labview is a symptom of the people and not the language. every time labview is brought up in meetings as the target language, there is often a gut reaction by people, but to be frank, those people actually know very little of the labview language, have never used its OOP features, are not even aware of its debugging capabilities and tools, and thus, their opinion is moot. just because someone used labview in college in a trivial way but didn't like it doesn't give them a professional voice with regard to labview. all they usually want to do is develop unreliable systems using c/c++ or python because that's the "hardcore" way of doing things. and yet, it's those projects that are often pining for help in the end when things aren't working. so yes, labview is different, but if you treat it differently, it can greatly increase your efficiency and ability to quickly turn around robust systems. i develop systems in time units of months, not years, and my software is well known to just work. what would you say the "confusing syntax" is that leads to unmaintainable software?

deforciant 7y ago

I have been successfully using Node-RED for quite some time now (https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/) :) really like it so far, great tool to quickly add simple and complex health checks to your systems and automate various tasks that no necessarily deserve to have their own services. Kinda like your own FaaS platform (mine runs on an Intel NUC). Luna looks great and I actually think I initially saw it and then I was looking for it but couldn't find it, ending up with Node-RED. I might give it a try, however I didn't see any mentions of how it integrates with Git :/

d21d3q 7y ago
> I might give it a try, however I didn't see any mentions of how it integrates with Git :/ Like this: [https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/projects/ https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/projects/]

itodd 7y ago

This looks interesting and I tried to play with it but the colors are so dark and everything is hard to see.

stevenpetryk 7y ago
I sound like a broken record but accessibility makes sites better for everyone, not just disabled people!
- rofrol 7y ago
  dark background is bad for eyes
  - blunte 7y ago
    For working late at night with low ambient light, "dark mode" styles are not so bad. But in normal daylight, or worse - outside - dark mode UIs are terrible. It's a fad that I wish would stop propagating.

PaulHoule 7y ago

There are quite a few "boxes and lines" tools out there such as Alteryx, Actian, LabView, KNIME, etc. Many people swear by them. I like that Luna has a text syntax. I also like that Luna supports building graph functional blocks that can be nested inside other graphs. That's a missing link in other tools of this type that limits the scale of what you can do with them. I'd like to see a tool like this which has something like a JSON document going over the lines, but that might be asking too much. If the objects going over the lines are basically relational rows you can do columnar execution at very high speed. The Actian people have looked at alternatives to what they do, but I think they haven't extended the data model past relational because they couldn't get it fast enough to compete with their own product. (e.g. a classic "disruptive technology")

Retra 7y ago
I don't know... I look at this and I just see an alternative front-end for a spreadsheet program.
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  Spread sheet programs are functional languages. Luna looks to be a functional language, hence the similarity. Spread sheet programs just have a bad rap of being used by non-programmers, and limited functionality outside of the spreadsheet universe. Ignoring the caveats mentioned, the principles of spreadsheet programming are programmatically sound. Spreadsheet programmers are functional programmers.
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    More to the point, execution of a spreadsheet does not progress in one particular direction, rather when you update the data the engine can figure out what cells are affected by the change. Business rules engines work in a similar way, Prolog works in the exact opposite direction. The trouble w/ spreadsheets I think is organizational. Some things are an exact match for the 2-d grid, other things (say you fill out 5 numeric fields and then calculate with scalar formulas to produce a similar dimensional output) are easy to express with it (even if tk/solver is a better fit.) Then you rapidly go over a cliff where you don't have the organizational tools to handle it -- tuple and set values programming (eg. Matlab, Sql) is one answer, object oriented is another.

LudwigNagasena 7y ago

How is it different from other ETL tools?

daemonk 7y ago

Does it support any kind of HPC job launching feature?

badsavage 7y ago

Pretty cool

JaimeThompson 7y ago

How does Luna make money? I am worried about the possibility of features being moved behind a paid version after people are tied to the product.

maxyme 7y ago
They posted about this on HN before, basically they are VC funded and would like to make their money back by providing community support and paid features. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14613264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14613264

agentofuser 7y ago

Neat! Anyone with more understanding can point out differences with statebox[1]? Both seem to be: - visual and textual - purely functional - dataflow-like I get the feeling that statebox might not be turing complete (guaranteed termination) and have a stronger focus on formal verification. Also, it doesn't seem to have a visual editor yet. [1]: https://statebox.org/what-is/ https://statebox.org/what-is/

wires 7y ago
hi, I know Statebox pretty well :) Luna not super well, but I did beta test their first release (and some later versions), cool stuff. Anyway, the two are (feature wise) very similar, as you noted: - both have textual/visual representations, - are typed FP languages, - access to FFI/effects, - diagram nesting But Statebox is _not_ data-flow, it's more about "control flow" or "multi-party protocol execution". (You could do data-flow with Statebox, but at the moment that's prohibitively inefficient.) Where Statebox takes a different direction (I think) is in basing the language on established concepts from category theory and focussing on 'generality/compositionality' ; specifically, our diagrams are not "graphs", but (morphisms in) categories. This difference is very very subtle, in fact, seems totally irrelevant if you want to visual programming (see the nice codex, clearly it works using graphs!) but it becomes more important when you want to diagram's to be "universal". at least in principle, the Statebox language should naturally and compositionally translate to any kind of hardware ; we want you to be able to program smart contracts, p2p-systems, JS frontends, digital circuits, heck, maybe even slime molds, all from the same diagram. Luna certainly has more features at this stage. (also, our editor is under heavy development and not yet published, we are aiming to release some things around the statebox summit in september) Maybe it's fair to say: Luna is like a better NodeRED, Statebox is conceptually closer to something like homotopy.io / globular.science ? Hope this clears things up a bit

spiralganglion 7y ago

Plug — for anyone researching or otherwise interested in visual languages like Luna, I keep a collection of projects, papers, talks, references, and other related media here on Github: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex As for Luna, it seems like they've gone quiet for the past while, though I believe they're still hard at work on the project. Hopefully they can improve the stability and performance of the program, because to date I've found it almost unusable. For a similarly interesting project (albeit not visual in the same way), I recommend people also take a look a isomorƒ: https://isomorf.io https://isomorf.io

breck 7y ago
Wow, thanks for putting that together. I think this is the best list of visual programming tools I've seen to date. Very easy to scan with the images in there.
- wiz21c 7y ago
  yeah, the list is very interesting to read. The screenshots are a plus !
- spiralganglion 7y ago
  Thanks! Gradually adding more screenshots whenever I get the time. Glad to know the format works well for you.
mottosso 7y ago
I love these. Here's one more: http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarmming-languages-snapshots/ http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarm...
- spiralganglion 7y ago
  You'll find that link, and a few other great ones like it, on the "Reflections" page of my codex: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/master/reflections.md https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/m... My favourite is the "Gallery of Programmer Interfaces" by Jonathan Edwards: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bEgysfDmb8PDV6iCAjH5JIvaI/preview https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE... I can also heartily recommend following Edwards on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathoda https://twitter.com/jonathoda

ComodoHacker 7y ago

>WYSIWYG language Please, let's refrain from such awkward terminology. "Graphic language", "visual language" are fine. "WYSIWYG data processing" is okay. But let's not forget any graphic syntax is an abstraction.

DonaldFisk 7y ago
An abstraction of what? If the paradigm is dataflow - i.e. capable of running directly on (hypothetical) dataflow hardware - a graphical representation is more natural than a textual one.
pierrec 7y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure how the term applies here. If you're using Luna to make a program that generates output, "what you see" (the node graph) is definitely not "what you get" (the output). Maybe you can have an inline preview, but it's not what you're editing. WYSIWYG describes domain-specific tools that let you manipulate the final product directly (or a draft of it), without having to look at any kind of source, be it a node graph or source code.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

I didn't take a look deeply but that graph looks like function composition. Looks like luna is a functional programming language.

pankajdoharey 7y ago

I've seen it so many times on HN, i wonder if anyone uses it in production?

DonaldFisk 7y ago

It would have been a good idea to contact the developers before posting a link to their project, to involve them in the discussion, and allow them to clear up any misunderstandings about their work.

wut42 7y ago

The discord widget that eats part of the screen on mobile is very annoying - besides the fact that another OSS project is using proprietary communications systems.

didibus 7y ago

I think the question I've always had with these visual languages is if they target user friendliness and ease of use in the hope that non-programmers can use them? Or do they actually think it'll be more productive for professional programmers than text based languages? I think for the latter, it'll be really really difficult to achieve. I can maybe see the former, but I also worry for the former, these are too general, and domain specific graphical tools will always dominate.