unit VS ideas

Compare unit vs ideas and see what are their differences.

ideas

a hundred ideas for computing - a record of ideas - https://samsquire.github.io/ideas/ (by samsquire)
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unit ideas
12 19
2,377 3,760
- -
9.7 1.8
13 days ago over 1 year ago
TypeScript
MIT License -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
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

Posts with mentions or reviews of unit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-29.
  • Visual Node Graph with ImGui
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Sep 2023
    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

  • Unit (Visual Programming System) [video]
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2023
    And https://unit.land for the demo
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2023
    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.)

  • A personal history of visual programming environments (2021)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Dec 2022
    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

  • Ask HN: More “experimental“ UIs for editing/writing code?
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Aug 2022
    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.

ideas

Posts with mentions or reviews of ideas. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-22.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing unit and ideas you can also consider the following projects:

cs246e-notes - Object oriented programming notes

num - Num: number utilities for mathematics

hugotunius.se - My website/blog. Jekyll, S3, Cloudflare

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.

ideas2 - Another 85+ Ideas for Computing https://samsquire.github.io/ideas2/

qubes-thinkpad-x1-extreme-gen3 - Files and notes to install/run Qubes 4.1 on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen3

gtoolkit - Glamorous Toolkit is the Moldable Development environment. It empowers you to make systems explainable through experiences tailored for each problem.

ideas4 - An Additional 100 Ideas for Computing https://samsquire.github.io/ideas4/

chatgpt-shell - ChatGPT and DALL-E Emacs shells + Org babel 🦄 + a shell maker for other providers

NeDB - The JavaScript Database, for Node.js, nw.js, electron and the browser

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