10 ms·

I've been wanting this sort of thing for ages. Considering how sophisticated we think we are, how the hell are we still using tools like emacs, or even VS on a

I've been wanting this sort of thing for ages. Considering how sophisticated we think we are, how the hell are we still using tools like emacs, or even VS on a daily basis? We should be indistinguishable from magic by now. This is a (small) step in the right direction. Can we please live in the future already?

jsmcgd 15y ago
Seconded. I made some designs for a graphical IDE like this years ago, but only on paper. I'm very happy to see someone else has done the hard work for me! I hope they'll support other languages too.
- spitfire 15y ago
  It's funny, more and more I'm moving my work to Mathematica because it works sort of like this already. That, and it's as far along the power curve from python/ruby as python/ruby is from C.
  - Arelius 15y ago
    What kind of work do you do? Moving the work from what language? Do you not worry about having to pay huge licensing fees to run your code elsewhere?
    - spitfire 15y ago
      Executive brief - Go high end, where the money is. Where results are valued. Licensing isn't an issue - $3K/year+libraries for development. A runtime player for Mathematica costs $300. You just have to pick your projects carefully - No rails todo apps. One recent project I worked on was auto segmentation and labelling of MRI images. Auto-segmentation was the easy part. Labelling however took several different approaches before I got something that works reliably.
      - Arelius 15y ago
        This sounds like the kind of work that most people I know would choose matlab for (image segmentation). I personally have never used either for such, but do you have any thoughts on the matter? Is Mathematica getting better at the things matlab used to be best at?
        spitfire 15y ago
        It sort of comes down to what you're comfortable with. In this case, the strict image analysis parts were more minor compared to the real work. Also, Matlab seems to be stagnating, while Mathematica has been growing by leaps and bounds. Also, matlab doesn't have built in functionality for gui building, afaik. A lot of my other work is much less suited to matlab. Mathematica is certainly much better for multi-domain work, which matlab barely supports.
        taliesinb 15y ago
        I think most people you are know are just ignorant of how much better Mathematica is. It's okay. People like to stick to what they know.
        Arelius 15y ago
        Being more of a software engineer than a mathematician, and having no MatLab experience, and more basic Mathematica experience. That is, in fact, the the impression that I get. But I still see people using MatLab what seems like more often, and have no weight to backup my claim. I suppose I could learn both and do research, but in general, that seems so less important than getting actual work done. One aspect that seems to be brought up about MatLab often is the community, it's often claimed, especially in the co punter vision world, that if an algorithm exists, it has an available implementation in MatLab source. Which seems significant.
  - taliesinb 15y ago
    One neat thing about working with Mathematica in Eclipse is that successive clicking expands your selection 'outwards' up the syntax tree. It's an quite astoundingly useful feature for refactoring. I'm sure some LISP editors have this too, but in a m-expression language like Mathematica it seems like magic.
    - spitfire 15y ago
      Are you talking wolfram workbench or eclipse? (I don't have workbench). If eclipse has mms support I'll be trying that out tonight.
      - taliesinb 15y ago
        Ah, my bad. You can install it as an Eclipse plugin, but that seems to require access to an internal server. So guess you're stuck with the Workbench, our branded version of Eclipse, which requires "premier service". Sorry!
        spitfire 15y ago
        Yeah. I don't have premier service. (When it says "call for quote" I leave) I'm guessing you work for wolfram? Is there a demo available somewhere?
    - gsg 15y ago
      When I was first learning elisp, one of the utilities I wrote was a flood-selection feature that sounds very similar to what you describe. Interestingly, it turned out to be quite useful in C code despite only being aware of string and paren (and brace and bracket) boundaries.
  - rwallace 15y ago
    I've heard Mathematica praised before, but not in precisely those terms - I was under the impression it was more a DSL for mathematics. Can you give a few examples of things it can do that put it that far along the power curve relative to Python/Ruby?
    - taliesinb 15y ago
      Well, Wolfram|Alpha. I switch from computer vision to parsing to machine learning on a daily basis. But I haven't used the workhorse mathematics functions like Solve or Integrate in 3 years. Perhaps it would be better to call it a 'Domain General Language' for everything.
- zokier 15y ago
  Have you seen Code Bubbles? http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp
tikhonj 15y ago
Emacs is already indistinguishable from magic :). Seriously though, I actually prefer working with text, even here. Also, I think this could be improved by making "meta" symbols like defun into different shapes rather than just including them as words. So a definition would look like a different box than a normal statement. Probably the same for &optional. Of course, this wouldn't work for user-defined macros or functions, but it would be nice if just for the standard ones.
- Arelius 15y ago
  Yes, not having that feature is a bit perplexing, I already have emacs do something similar with font-lock. Among others, lambda gets replaced with λ.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  Oh, that's a nice idea. I have to admit that the boxes don't do much for me, but symbols would make it easier to see what's where.
tincholio 15y ago
Because Emacs (and Vim, but when talking LISP, especially Emacs) is already magic. The visualization proposed is nifty, but it's hard to beat Emacs for any code editing, let alone for LISP. Also, check this out: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el (you can see a screenie in http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png)
- colonel_panic 15y ago
  Now I'm disturbed by the lack of parens. What about situations where I have one pair of parens exactly contained in another, like in a one-argument defmethod? Edit: Now I see that I didn't notice that this situation happens in the "let maxcol 0" line in that image. I need to compare the colors on the line below to make sure I'm mentally parsing that line correctly.
  - simonb 15y ago
    (setq mwe:color-box-hide-parens nil)
pnathan 15y ago
I have written some amount of Lisp - at this point in the 5-10KLoC range, and I don't think this tool is a great editor. However, it's one of the more useful code/program visualizations I've come across.
ken 15y ago
I've given this a lot of thought, because I'm working on a couple of vaguely similar projects. My conclusion so far is that pretty-printing is great, but enforcing structural constraints in the editor (beyond perhaps something like ParEdit) tends to cause more trouble than it's worth. Consider the transformations you might do on a piece of source code while you're playing around. A lot of these (for me, anyway) are things which change not just position or name, but the part-of-speech of words, or temporarily make a nonsensical expression. (I do it in my shell a lot, too.) Rigid structure-enforcing editors hinder this. So for Lisp, either you end up with something that's less useful than Emacs, or something that's just a thin display layer on s-exps (which is fine, but not game-changing) and then users have to understand s-exp editing anyway. The fact that the names of special forms, functions, and variables are all symbols in Lisp is not mere coincidence. This highlights one of the big frustrations I have with most programming languages: they optimize for making a section of code look good and concise, but as a programmer I want a language that also optimizes for my changes being concise. For example, C# can look pretty decent in many cases, but changes which are conceptually simple can be huge diffs. Quoting an expression in Lisp is literally one character, but it takes 5 lines to quote a print statement in C# <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y2k85ax6.aspx> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y2k85ax6.aspx>, and anything nontrivial grows painfully fast. This is why it's impossible for me to truly assess something by looking at sample code, or a screenshot -- so don't take this as a criticism of Pretty Lisp! It could be that as we move higher up the abstraction scale this becomes less important. After all, Mel wouldn't be happy at such a high level as "characters". But I think there's something fundamental about the concept of quoting symbols -- 'using something as something else' -- whether those symbols are bits or characters or round-rects. The #' in the screenshot here looks out of place, as if the author didn't know quite what to do with it. I look forward to see what the author can make of this (new ideas and experimentation are great!) but I don't see anything here yet that jumps out at me as revolutionary, or must-have functionality.
- ken 15y ago
  I guess that sounds like kind of a downer (even though I said I liked experimentation and didn't want to make it sound like criticism of this particular implementation). I think there are definitely paths forward here, and my hunch (which you shouldn't listen to, because I don't know anything) is that the most promising one would be some combination of some/all of: - Not use Common Lisp as a base. Lisp is great, but reader macros and visualizations are a really tough combination. - Come up with a good visualization for quoting. If your fundamental units of computation are "symbol/word" and "box" (a neat concept to build a language around), then incorporate quoting into those things somehow. I don't have a good answer for you here, but I think this is the key to unlocking the whole thing. - Integrate with other tools (or upgrade them to this visual symbol/box world) that make good use of text today, like version control, sed/grep, or editor extensions (as in Emacs). If there was a programming environment that offered the same level of flexibility and power that I have today, but which was visual (and beautiful), I could see that being a very compelling upgrade. I'm fascinated by visual languages, and I find it unfortunate that they all seem to acquire visuals by sacrificing power.
jimbokun 15y ago
When you want to write an essay, do you use something that draws your essay as some complex graphical representation, or do you use something like Word or a text editor, that for the most part shows your essay as just a bunch of boring characters on the screen? Sure, there may be some fonts and indentation and colors. (Eclipse and VS use those, too.) But the text is the point. It's the same with code. Code is a means of expression, best treated as text. Every attempt at turning it into something graphical always reduces the expressiveness.
- Detrus 15y ago
  We have the systems we have now because we used the same medium for thousands of years. To create new expressive mediums that take advantage of computers will take careful design and iteration, just as alphabetic text went through various handscripts like cursive, torturous to read German blackletter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter and settled on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_type Then we went to san serifs (like here on HN) and then to monospaced code fonts. It's a long line and a lot of work by designers. Adding to this medium will also take a lot of work. An essay can be more expressive when various ideas in it are turned into visualizations. Writers of long novels use special writer software to keep track of which characters interact with what others, to create family charts, friend charts, event timelines, etc. These don't replace text, they augment it. And it would be interesting to have a macro view of the book through such tools for readers someday. Not every attempt reduced the expressiveness of code. Syntax highlighting is graphical. Labview is graphical. Short compile cycles so the programmer can see what he's doing is graphical. Great demo of that here https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366 Just because this particular attempt at pretty lisp leaves much to be desired doesn't mean we should stop attempting. Simple programmer tasks like naming can be improved if we move away from plain text as the medium, more detail here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633740 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633740 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3651257 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3651257
  - jimbokun 15y ago
    Yes, to be more clear, I should have said all the attempts to replace code with some kind of a graphical representation, ends up reducing expressiveness. Augmenting the text with graphical representations is a wonderful idea, that IDEs already perform in many ways, with many more yet to be discovered.
el_presidente 15y ago
We switched from graphics to text a couple of thousand years ago and it's helped us a lot. People have been killing the command line for decades, yet anyone who uses a search engine is working with a cli.

jsmcgd 15y ago

Seconded. I made some designs for a graphical IDE like this years ago, but only on paper. I'm very happy to see someone else has done the hard work for me! I hope they'll support other languages too.

spitfire 15y ago
It's funny, more and more I'm moving my work to Mathematica because it works sort of like this already. That, and it's as far along the power curve from python/ruby as python/ruby is from C.
- Arelius 15y ago
  What kind of work do you do? Moving the work from what language? Do you not worry about having to pay huge licensing fees to run your code elsewhere?
  - spitfire 15y ago
    Executive brief - Go high end, where the money is. Where results are valued. Licensing isn't an issue - $3K/year+libraries for development. A runtime player for Mathematica costs $300. You just have to pick your projects carefully - No rails todo apps. One recent project I worked on was auto segmentation and labelling of MRI images. Auto-segmentation was the easy part. Labelling however took several different approaches before I got something that works reliably.
    - Arelius 15y ago
      This sounds like the kind of work that most people I know would choose matlab for (image segmentation). I personally have never used either for such, but do you have any thoughts on the matter? Is Mathematica getting better at the things matlab used to be best at?
      - spitfire 15y ago
        It sort of comes down to what you're comfortable with. In this case, the strict image analysis parts were more minor compared to the real work. Also, Matlab seems to be stagnating, while Mathematica has been growing by leaps and bounds. Also, matlab doesn't have built in functionality for gui building, afaik. A lot of my other work is much less suited to matlab. Mathematica is certainly much better for multi-domain work, which matlab barely supports.
      - taliesinb 15y ago
        I think most people you are know are just ignorant of how much better Mathematica is. It's okay. People like to stick to what they know.
        Arelius 15y ago
        Being more of a software engineer than a mathematician, and having no MatLab experience, and more basic Mathematica experience. That is, in fact, the the impression that I get. But I still see people using MatLab what seems like more often, and have no weight to backup my claim. I suppose I could learn both and do research, but in general, that seems so less important than getting actual work done. One aspect that seems to be brought up about MatLab often is the community, it's often claimed, especially in the co punter vision world, that if an algorithm exists, it has an available implementation in MatLab source. Which seems significant.
- taliesinb 15y ago
  One neat thing about working with Mathematica in Eclipse is that successive clicking expands your selection 'outwards' up the syntax tree. It's an quite astoundingly useful feature for refactoring. I'm sure some LISP editors have this too, but in a m-expression language like Mathematica it seems like magic.
  - spitfire 15y ago
    Are you talking wolfram workbench or eclipse? (I don't have workbench). If eclipse has mms support I'll be trying that out tonight.
    - taliesinb 15y ago
      Ah, my bad. You can install it as an Eclipse plugin, but that seems to require access to an internal server. So guess you're stuck with the Workbench, our branded version of Eclipse, which requires "premier service". Sorry!
      - spitfire 15y ago
        Yeah. I don't have premier service. (When it says "call for quote" I leave) I'm guessing you work for wolfram? Is there a demo available somewhere?
  - gsg 15y ago
    When I was first learning elisp, one of the utilities I wrote was a flood-selection feature that sounds very similar to what you describe. Interestingly, it turned out to be quite useful in C code despite only being aware of string and paren (and brace and bracket) boundaries.
- rwallace 15y ago
  I've heard Mathematica praised before, but not in precisely those terms - I was under the impression it was more a DSL for mathematics. Can you give a few examples of things it can do that put it that far along the power curve relative to Python/Ruby?
  - taliesinb 15y ago
    Well, Wolfram|Alpha. I switch from computer vision to parsing to machine learning on a daily basis. But I haven't used the workhorse mathematics functions like Solve or Integrate in 3 years. Perhaps it would be better to call it a 'Domain General Language' for everything.
zokier 15y ago
Have you seen Code Bubbles? http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp

tikhonj 15y ago

Emacs is already indistinguishable from magic :). Seriously though, I actually prefer working with text, even here. Also, I think this could be improved by making "meta" symbols like defun into different shapes rather than just including them as words. So a definition would look like a different box than a normal statement. Probably the same for &optional. Of course, this wouldn't work for user-defined macros or functions, but it would be nice if just for the standard ones.

Arelius 15y ago
Yes, not having that feature is a bit perplexing, I already have emacs do something similar with font-lock. Among others, lambda gets replaced with λ.
Vivtek 15y ago
Oh, that's a nice idea. I have to admit that the boxes don't do much for me, but symbols would make it easier to see what's where.

tincholio 15y ago

Because Emacs (and Vim, but when talking LISP, especially Emacs) is already magic. The visualization proposed is nifty, but it's hard to beat Emacs for any code editing, let alone for LISP. Also, check this out: http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/mwe-color-box.el (you can see a screenie in http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png http://www.foldr.org/~michaelw/emacs/color-box.png)

colonel_panic 15y ago
Now I'm disturbed by the lack of parens. What about situations where I have one pair of parens exactly contained in another, like in a one-argument defmethod? Edit: Now I see that I didn't notice that this situation happens in the "let maxcol 0" line in that image. I need to compare the colors on the line below to make sure I'm mentally parsing that line correctly.
- simonb 15y ago
  (setq mwe:color-box-hide-parens nil)

pnathan 15y ago

I have written some amount of Lisp - at this point in the 5-10KLoC range, and I don't think this tool is a great editor. However, it's one of the more useful code/program visualizations I've come across.

ken 15y ago

I've given this a lot of thought, because I'm working on a couple of vaguely similar projects. My conclusion so far is that pretty-printing is great, but enforcing structural constraints in the editor (beyond perhaps something like ParEdit) tends to cause more trouble than it's worth. Consider the transformations you might do on a piece of source code while you're playing around. A lot of these (for me, anyway) are things which change not just position or name, but the part-of-speech of words, or temporarily make a nonsensical expression. (I do it in my shell a lot, too.) Rigid structure-enforcing editors hinder this. So for Lisp, either you end up with something that's less useful than Emacs, or something that's just a thin display layer on s-exps (which is fine, but not game-changing) and then users have to understand s-exp editing anyway. The fact that the names of special forms, functions, and variables are all symbols in Lisp is not mere coincidence. This highlights one of the big frustrations I have with most programming languages: they optimize for making a section of code look good and concise, but as a programmer I want a language that also optimizes for my changes being concise. For example, C# can look pretty decent in many cases, but changes which are conceptually simple can be huge diffs. Quoting an expression in Lisp is literally one character, but it takes 5 lines to quote a print statement in C# <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y2k85ax6.aspx> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y2k85ax6.aspx>, and anything nontrivial grows painfully fast. This is why it's impossible for me to truly assess something by looking at sample code, or a screenshot -- so don't take this as a criticism of Pretty Lisp! It could be that as we move higher up the abstraction scale this becomes less important. After all, Mel wouldn't be happy at such a high level as "characters". But I think there's something fundamental about the concept of quoting symbols -- 'using something as something else' -- whether those symbols are bits or characters or round-rects. The #' in the screenshot here looks out of place, as if the author didn't know quite what to do with it. I look forward to see what the author can make of this (new ideas and experimentation are great!) but I don't see anything here yet that jumps out at me as revolutionary, or must-have functionality.

ken 15y ago
I guess that sounds like kind of a downer (even though I said I liked experimentation and didn't want to make it sound like criticism of this particular implementation). I think there are definitely paths forward here, and my hunch (which you shouldn't listen to, because I don't know anything) is that the most promising one would be some combination of some/all of: - Not use Common Lisp as a base. Lisp is great, but reader macros and visualizations are a really tough combination. - Come up with a good visualization for quoting. If your fundamental units of computation are "symbol/word" and "box" (a neat concept to build a language around), then incorporate quoting into those things somehow. I don't have a good answer for you here, but I think this is the key to unlocking the whole thing. - Integrate with other tools (or upgrade them to this visual symbol/box world) that make good use of text today, like version control, sed/grep, or editor extensions (as in Emacs). If there was a programming environment that offered the same level of flexibility and power that I have today, but which was visual (and beautiful), I could see that being a very compelling upgrade. I'm fascinated by visual languages, and I find it unfortunate that they all seem to acquire visuals by sacrificing power.

jimbokun 15y ago

When you want to write an essay, do you use something that draws your essay as some complex graphical representation, or do you use something like Word or a text editor, that for the most part shows your essay as just a bunch of boring characters on the screen? Sure, there may be some fonts and indentation and colors. (Eclipse and VS use those, too.) But the text is the point. It's the same with code. Code is a means of expression, best treated as text. Every attempt at turning it into something graphical always reduces the expressiveness.

Detrus 15y ago
We have the systems we have now because we used the same medium for thousands of years. To create new expressive mediums that take advantage of computers will take careful design and iteration, just as alphabetic text went through various handscripts like cursive, torturous to read German blackletter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter and settled on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_type Then we went to san serifs (like here on HN) and then to monospaced code fonts. It's a long line and a lot of work by designers. Adding to this medium will also take a lot of work. An essay can be more expressive when various ideas in it are turned into visualizations. Writers of long novels use special writer software to keep track of which characters interact with what others, to create family charts, friend charts, event timelines, etc. These don't replace text, they augment it. And it would be interesting to have a macro view of the book through such tools for readers someday. Not every attempt reduced the expressiveness of code. Syntax highlighting is graphical. Labview is graphical. Short compile cycles so the programmer can see what he's doing is graphical. Great demo of that here https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366 Just because this particular attempt at pretty lisp leaves much to be desired doesn't mean we should stop attempting. Simple programmer tasks like naming can be improved if we move away from plain text as the medium, more detail here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633740 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633740 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3651257 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3651257
- jimbokun 15y ago
  Yes, to be more clear, I should have said all the attempts to replace code with some kind of a graphical representation, ends up reducing expressiveness. Augmenting the text with graphical representations is a wonderful idea, that IDEs already perform in many ways, with many more yet to be discovered.

el_presidente 15y ago

We switched from graphics to text a couple of thousand years ago and it's helped us a lot. People have been killing the command line for decades, yet anyone who uses a search engine is working with a cli.