ganja.js VS TermKit

Some people's brains just work this way. Here's an example of a somewhat popular and regularly maintained library written in a similar style: https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js/blob/6e97cb45d780cd7c66...

Once your learn to recognise the commonalities, you'll see examples everywhere. The most extreme and stereotypical version is the billboards written by some homeless people. You can probably picture it already in your mind's eye: A wall of very dense text with little whitespace or structure, and a mix of fonts and colours seemingly at random.

I had a brilliant mathematician friend who wrote like this. He would squeeze and entire semester's worth of study notes into a single sheet of paper, on one side. It was impenetrable gibberish to everyone else, but the colours and 2D positioning let him build a mental mind-map.

For people like this, if you reformat their code even a tiny bit, their mental map is invalidated, and they lose track of it completely and become upset. I discovered this (the hard way) when applying automatic code formatting tools to the codebases I mentioned previously.

Personally, I find this type of thing to be absolutely fascinating, because it's the intersection of many fields of study, and hence is under-studied. There's elements of pedagogy, psychology, literacy, compute science, etc...

It's an open question how we can get large groups of neurodiverse humans to collaborate on a codebase when they don't even "read" or "think" in compatible ways!

I was watching bivector videos and how it could be a viable replacement for matrix algebra in video games and I have been very impressed by the intuitiveness and consistency of the equations. There is this ganja.js for demonstrating the graphics and has a rust generated code https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js/tree/master/codegen/rust I'm too naive to understand the implementation, but I'm glad a library like ultraviolet is here to start paving the use of Geometric Algebra in computer graphics.

Well I've been on a real Geometric Algebra (aka Clifford Algebra) kick lately, and ran across ganja.js [1]. It's a single no deps file that is...impressive. 120k uncompressed, and with it you can construct any degree algebra (including the more esoteric hyperbolic/parabolic ones), render to canvas, svg or webgl(!). It also includes a clever little DSL parser and interpreter (it overloads the scientific notation to name basis vectors!) that lets you construct more complex things from simple things using various kinds of products.

The author, Steven De Keninck, is quite impressive as well, having got his start in the demoscene some time ago. He has a good video from 2019 that explains why this algebra is better than [matrices, tensors, vectors, complex numbers]. Of particular interest (to me anyway) is the 2D projective geometry.

I don't want to oversell it, but ganja is fucking amazing and there is a great deal I want to do with it. For one, I'd like to recapitulate my physics degree with it.

[1] https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo

Great documentation!

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!