unit
Light Table
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unit | Light Table | |
---|---|---|
12 | 10 | |
2,435 | 11,740 | |
- | - | |
9.7 | 0.0 | |
14 days ago | almost 2 years ago | |
TypeScript | Clojure | |
MIT License | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
unit
- Unit – Next Generation Visual Programming System
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Visual Node Graph with ImGui
https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit recently, which at least uses some kind of hinted auto-layout (besides the more propriety fancy)
I really want to see more graphical coding for years, but node/graph-based and blockly seem to be the only approaches that got sone traction so far. So I like this thread and it seems at the right place.
I'd wish to see
- Next Generation Visual Programming System
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Unit (Visual Programming System) [video]
Interesting, and clearly a lot of work's gone into this (60,000 lines of Typescript), particularly the UI, which is impressive (if, sometimes, over the top). I've been developing a similar system (http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/TOC.html) and it's interesting to note the similarities and differences.
Similarities: code as directed graphs (less obvious in FMJ); can only connect outputs to units of compatible type; if and wait (looping is handled differently); sticky values; sliders. These design decisions are practically forced on you, but are often absent in earlier visual dataflow languages (e.g. Prograph, LabVIEW).
Differences: (1) inputs are named in Unit, ordered in FMJ (though they're named in formulas and edges can be labelled). (2) I experimented with automatic code layout but found this was too slow and not always what I wanted. Well done for getting this to work. (3) FMJ is now fully homoiconic - this maybe isn't a priority for Unit.
The Unit design philosophy is explained in https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit/blob/main/src/docs/conc... . This doesn't mention earlier approaches (e.g. the Manchester Dataflow Computer, Prograph) and it seems to be based on vaguely similar ideas developed more recently (Morrison's Flow Based programming; possibly React and similar systems for web development - I'm unfamiliar with these).
I have a number of questions:
(1) How does the type system work? Is it Dependently typed, Hindley-Milner, or something more basic? (FMJ is Hindley-Milner, with dependent typing partially implemented). How are new types be defined?
(2) How is the visual representation stored? One criticism I faced was that people wanted a readable textual representation which would work well with existing version control systems, a problem I have now largely solved.
(3) How are runtime errors handled?
(4) Is recursion supported? (I assume yes, but I didn't see any examples.) What about macros?
(5) What does Unit compile to? (FMJ has an experimental compiler where programs are compiled by running their source without evaluating their inputs, output is Lisp.)
- Unit.land
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A personal history of visual programming environments (2021)
I enjoyed reading this. I knew of quartz composer but I never did anything with it.
I love visual tools and I think they are underutilized today. I cut my teeth in ~2005 with Houdini[0] and Fusion[1] which are both heavily graph / node based (and procedural).
Most recently I have been rekindling my love for visual programming and flow based programming and plan to spend some time in January and February doing more research around flow based programming for infrastructure management.
I plan to get this sort of info published on my website which I have neglected for half a decade or more but if you are interested in visual programming you might enjoy checking these out:
Unit from Samuel Timbó:
https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit
A video of me exploring what I figured out about it (while also learning to stream) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8
Behave-Graph from Ben Houston:
https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph
And the products I learned so long ago
[0] Houdini https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
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Ask HN: More “experimental“ UIs for editing/writing code?
https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit
- A code drawn in unit is simply a Directed Graph.
- Programming can be partially performed by Gesture and by Voice.
- Unit: Next Generation Visual Programming Platform
Light Table
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Light Table
https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable
Looks like the project has been archived
- Ask HN: More “experimental“ UIs for editing/writing code?
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A Source Code Path Visualizer
I think LightTable development stalled out when the original creator left the project in 2015. Likely the project was too ambitious and maybe ahead of its time. Or maybe Clojure was not the right language to build an IDE...
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Ask HN: Best Dev Tool pitches of all time?
I think the closest we got to a closure of Light Table is this: https://chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/
Which includes:
> Light Table will continue to go on strong. We haven’t talked too much about it lately, but it’s used by tens of thousands of people and still growing. We use it every day to help us build Eve and thanks to the awesome people in the community that has sprung up around it, it gets better every week.
Judging by GitHub contribution data (https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/graphs/contributors...), it seems there has only been 25 commits (from one author) since Sep 20, 2019.
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AWESOME WINDOWS TOOLS
Light Table - A customizable editor with instant feedback and showing data values flow through your code.
- [번역] From node-webkit to Electron 1.0
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Are there extensible environments in the manner of Emacs outside of text editors and developer tools generally?
Most IDEs nowadays are as extensible as Emacs is, but most people don't think of them as app platforms, they think of them as IDEs, so they don't bother craeting Email or IRC clients for their IDEs: - Racket's own DrRacket IDE is pretty extensible, although no one seems to try to extend it with apps like Magit, Org-Mode, Calc, or whatever other useful features that Emacs provides. It is theoretically possible, but it just hasn't happened yet. - LightTable is a powerful programming editor written and extensible in Clojure. - Gnome's Gedit can be scripted in Python.
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Emacs on Graal
I think it would be better to create an Emacs Lisp interpreter in Clojure for the LightTable editor.
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Code Shelter: collective to help maintain popular OSS whose authors need a hand or don't have the time any more
It looks like it's not completely abandoned, at least. https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/discussions/2506
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Cider 1.0
I'm no Bozhidar, but thought I'd share some links you might find interesting:
- https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable - Clojure editor made in Clojure, not sure if it's being maintained anymore, core authors moved on to a different project if I remember correctly.
- https://github.com/mogenslund/liquid - Clojure editor made in Clojure, fairly new and basic but has a pretty tight integration with Clojure (itself really) which makes it interesting and it can also be embedded into other applications (or embed your other applications into Liquid)
- https://github.com/Olical/conjure - My daily driver for Clojure development. Is not an editor by itself, but it's written in Clojure, and exposed to neovim as a vim plugin. Not only supports Clojure, but also Fennel, Janet and Racket so far. Pretty handy if you sometimes like to dive into Clojure-like languages that are not Clojure (or Racket).
What are some alternatives?
vue-flow - A highly customizable Flowchart component for Vue 3. Features seamless zoom & pan 🔎, additional components like a Minimap 🗺 and utilities to interact with state and graph.
Atom - :atom: The hackable text editor
lisperanto - Lisperanto is a spatial canvas for programming; Lisperanto is a spatial canvas for knowledge; Lisperanto is a spatial canvas for ideas;
Visual Studio Code - Visual Studio Code
impulse - Impossible Dev Tools for React and Tailwind
GNU Emacs - Mirror of GNU Emacs
metadesk
Brackets - An open source code editor for the web, written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
awesome-structure-editors - A list of projectional and structural editors
intellij-community - IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition & IntelliJ Platform
nodezator - A multi-purpose visual node editor for the Python programming language
Vim - The official Vim repository