consola VS TermKit

Console logs are not always well structured and eye-pleasing. Unpleasant and messy console takes away from the bliss of a developer. I recently came across a package named consola which does exactly this — making consoles meaningful and elegant.

consola library is a great alternative to JavaScript console. Provides some really neat formatting and more power features.

https://github.com/unjs/consola

First time I saw an idea like this was with termkit [1], which I thought was great and was sad to see it didn't get continued development.

I really feel like we overlook the ways in which we limit ourselves by having our CLI interfaces be tied to a thing that emulates a terminal from the 80s.

The composability, scriptability, history, etc. of CLIs is great, but why should that preclude us from being able to quickly show a PNG or graph a function?

Maybe it's an idea whose time has come.

[1] https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

I'm impressed by this blog every time I see it, both visually and content-wise.

I agree with this. It's hard to nail down why Victor's talks are so compelling, when each of these items separately are much more mundane but are still quite well explored areas.

* "What if" feedback loops/direct manipulation

Victor's vision abstractly seems to be trying to predict/explore the consequence of some action in programming, and in specific demonstration seems to be using small widgets to allow easy manipulation of inputs to get an intuitive understanding of outputs. This could be boiled down to different goals: "Allow a program to be more easily tweaked" and "Explore a concept to get intuition of a different viewpoint". The more cynical/pragmatic interpretations for these are "make a GUI for your program" and "use interactive demos when teaching certain topics".

The first interpretation is almost comical, but we can maybe expand this to be "when you make a GUI, think about how your interface is being interpreted intuitively and this can help make your app more usable". This can maybe understood more easily when taken with the fact that Bret Victor helped design the interface for the first iPhone - famously intuitive to use. This also leads to its limitations - only concepts that have another more intuitive viewpoint can be represented. I can add a colour wheel to my WYSIWYG editor rather than hex values, but I can't easily create a GUI that lets me express that I want to validate, strip the whitespace from an email address and put it into lowercase.

The second interpretation leads to explorable explanations, which Victor has made a few of himself [0,1], but I would also cite Nicki Case [2] and unconed [3] as being other good examples. Again, this is only afforded to specific topics that have scope for exploration.

* Making logic feel more geometric/concrete

This can be seen in things like Labview (made in 1986), Apache NiFi (made in 2006) among others, e.g. SAS. In a sense, this has existed in the form of UNIX pipelines and functional programming since the first LISP was made. There is a further point which is "there currently aren't tools like this that are suitable for a non-programming audience", which is what 'Low Code' and 'No Code' is trying to achieve, but unfortunately in practice as soon as you hit a limitation of the framework then you're back to needing an engineer again.

* Human Interfaces

Sort of addressed in 'feedback loops' point above, but the DynamicLand is an interesting demo of what he's trying to get to. I think this speaks more to me with internet of things. I have friends who have set up full smart-home heating systems and can move music between rooms which are all very much seen the same as adjusting a physical thermostat rather than 'programming' or similar.

There is definitely a lot that can be explored here for certain applications, but there probably isn't direct utility in arranging pieces of paper with coloured dots on it in order to set the path of a robot. I can see this in a more consulting/capture sense of presenting certain input parameters in a more physical format, but again this is deviating from the OP's notion that this is a whole programming environment.

[0] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

[1] http://worrydream.com/KillMath/

[2] https://ncase.me

[3] https://acko.net

Just a ref: https://acko.net/

Cool, Steven Wittens is behind this. The header at https://acko.net/ is one of the first examples of WebGL I remember seeing in the wild, and still one of the cleanest. Looking forward to seeing where this goes!