unit VS awesome-structure-editors

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

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.)

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

https://ioun.it/

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/

[1] Fusion https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

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.

Yes, I think that we can do better than plain text as the source of truth, and thus git would probably need to change.

There's work around a bunch of languages that are not based on text, some have their own editor or a tool to manage a canonical representation in text for you that would make them friendlier to git.

  - https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/main/README.md

There's many more akin projects listed in https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma...

I can't wait fast enough for these ideas to reshape how we deal with programs and build stuff.

Haskell seems to be pretty big. For example in this list of projects it appears to be the second most popular language (after TypeScript) :)

See https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors

You could submit a pull request to get it added to awesome-structure-editors by /u/yairchu

It would be interesting to have such a general project go somewhere.

While in principle structural editing sounds like an incredible advance, there are 'good enough' advantages to plain-text tools that make it a much more practical solution. The other issue is of course integration with existing tooling, which you either skip entirely or compromise on the design.

What I feel is missing, between the description of "old, bad state of things" and "utopian vision" is a review of some of the projects that already tried to achieve this ideal state. It turns out there are a number of them, and most of them failed to achieve any traction or impact [0].

The rants are very long, so I skimmed quickly the one about git; I understand the complaints, although git is only bringing me joy and no pain --interactive rebase, absorb and a few aliases made it a breeze. But in a similar fashion there are projects trying to solve its fundamental issues, like pijul(.org); what are they missing?

[0] https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma...

Some good ones pops up in Projectional Programming [1] once in a while. The pinned thread links to the structure-editors github list [2] too.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax/

[2] https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors