QED VS enso

Not exactly "experimental", considering the Unix heritage, but -- line editors.

"I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing." -- Ken Thompson, on the superiority of ed to visual editors. Summarized by Peter Salus in A Quarter Century of UNIX (Addison-Wesley, 1994).

Definitely a blast from the past, but I do think line editors may force one to write simpler programs -- or to think in smaller chunks, as opposed to (doom)scrolling or moving about incrementally on a large screen.

Rob Pike's sam editor has an interesting command language. You're not limited to thinking in "lines" as in ed or sed; rather, the whole file is a giant string that you manipulate using regular expressions, external pipes, etc: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf

Its predecessor, qed, is also interesting, extremely powerful, but it seems to have a much steeper learning curve. I have used sam quite a bit, but not qed. https://github.com/phonologus/QED/raw/master/doc/qed-tutoria...

> At least I have yet to see one that is actually useful in the sense of a generic (or even a single-purpose-built) language

Yeah as said, https://github.com/enso-org/enso seems to be a general purpose functional programming language with visual editor, but otherwise I haven't really seen any no-code solutions worth their salt. I'm not particularly a fan of enso either, but it's the best I've seen.

Although it's not quite the same, I do like what Enso[0] is bringing to the table, especially the 1:1 visual node/language interop. Whether this is generalisable to a fully decoupled interface remains to be seen, but there's definitely potential.

[0]: https://enso.org/

I think Enso is already taken by a YC company [0]. Could get confusing.

[0] https://enso.org

COMPANY: Enso Inc. TYPE: Full time LOCATION: Europe and United States of America – fully distributed company REMOTE: Only remote VISA: No VISA required DESCRIPTION: Hi, we are Enso (enso.org, Y Combinator S21)! We are looking for an amazing Cloud engineer to join our core team. We are a remote first company, working in Europe and the USA.

Friends of mine are developing Enso (https://enso.org/), an interactive programming language with dual visual and textual representations.

Even well before Bret Victor's time, there were tools for visual programming. I have been using LabView to maintain data processing in an optical laboratory.

> I'm convinced this entire space should be visual.

At my last 2 jobs I spent entirely too much time debugging Matillion jobs, which are visual. I have my doubts that it’s the panacea that it appears to be.

That said, you may find Enso particularly interesting: https://github.com/enso-org/enso