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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Nice project, congrats. I think everybody here understands the idea behind your product (inspired by bret victor talk, fwiu). However, i think nothing would replace a nice screencast of what programming in this environment looks like. I didn't find it on your homepage, and i think it should be one of the very first thing.

my two cents.

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I don't think Bret Victor ever did a visual dataflow language, did he? This doesn't seem like the kind of thing he would do, it is more in the spirit of Quartz Composer (especially in its liveness and explorer) as well as VVVV, among many others. It also reminds a bit of Unreal blueprints in the way it handles completions on results (just draw out from the output, and you get a list of what patches you can bring in to deal with it).

It does seem like a nice replacement to Quartz Composer (well, we have Facebook Orgami now), since Apple isn't going anywhere with that these days (though aimed at data processing rather than graphics and animation).

Bret Victor's ideas are a very strong inspiration regarding where graphical interfaces could expand in the future. We strongly agree with his principle, that people need an immediate connection with data they are working on. This principle is one of two foundations on which Luna was actually built. We have described our thoughts in detail in our blog post here: https://medium.com/@luna_language/luna-the-visual-way-to-cre....

Bret Victor has written about these kinds of languages before, mainly in his "Drawing Dynamic Visualizations" notes (http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend..., talking about what he just presented):

> Is this "visual programming"? No. The term "visual programming" has had a well-established definition for several decades, and this tool is not that.

> A "visual programming language" provides graphical representation and spatial manipulation of the program structure. (That is, static "elements" or "operators", analogous to the "code" in a conventional programming language, or schematic components in a circuit).

> This is not the case with the tool here, which actually represents program structure as a fairly conventional list of textual instructions. The only direct manipulation of the instructions is merely in selecting them for looping, deleting, etc.

> Instead, the tool provides graphical representation and spatial manipulation of the program data. (Dynamic or "runtime" information, analogous to the values of data structures in a conventional programming language, or voltages in a circuit. In this case, the data is a picture.) The program structure is built up implicitly by directly manipulating the data.

Luna seems to lay firmly in the former category rather than the latter: it is firmly steeped in writing code to manipulate and visualize data, rather than manipulating data to get code. There isn't anything wrong with that, but I see a lot more similarities between Luna and Latour's Quartz Composer or Sweeney's Unreal Blueprints than I do with Bret's systems.

@seanmcdirmid We are not yet there, but we develop Luna to target EXACTLY these use cases - program modification AND very direct data manipulation. We see Luna as an unified platform for building rich DSL's. An example of such rich DSL is what Bret Victor demonstrated in his talk. You can read more about rich DSL's and what Luna is meant to be in our blog post here: https://medium.com/@luna_language/luna-the-visual-way-to-cre...

Regarding your thoughts, Luna is a fusion of both approaches. When you create and connect nodes, you are manipulating the program structure - you define how data flows between components. However, every node has the ability to display an interactive results visualization and input data widgets. Basically these visualizations and widgets allow you to work directly with data – you can create canvas visualization which let you paint on it, you can create a 3D scene visualization which would allow you to not only inspect 3D scenes but also modify them etc. These visualizations can be displayed below nodes or can be detached to be separate windows and are defined as HTML/js snippets.

Does it make sense to you?

I guess at this point, I just see a nice VPL; it seems to have the liveness properties of Quartz Composer, at least, which, as you say, displays an interactive results visualization and input data widgets (though you might have to turn the patch around or mouse over an input pin). It seems to fit into Tanimoto's liveness level 4 taxonomy.

If you have some direct manipulation and gradual abstraction going on, I haven't seen it in your examples or explained in your docs.

Also, have you checked out Conal Elliott's Tangible Functionla Programming (Eros) work? It is a bit dated (2007) but explores being more direct in a Haskell-like language.

http://conal.net/papers/Eros/

Hi @bsaul, our website is currently full of screencasts. If they do not load in your web browser, please tell us what is the browser and what system are you using. The ifrst screencast should appear in the website header - please wait couple of seconds and see if the movie will load there. In the meantime, please test it using Chrome! :)

I see really fast and hard to understand animations. What i mean is a 20 minute video demonstrating how to solve a real problem in the environment.

@bsaul, video tutorials are a very interesting idea. In the first release, however, we have incorporated few toy-projects and interactive tutorial, which guides you step by step inside the product. Do you think video tutorials are better to understand / follow than examples or interactive tutorials ?

I would definitely prefer video tutorials, they would be massively helpful for me to learn. By the way, if anyone wants to make a youtube channel about luna, I'd subscribe, if anyone wants to make a udemy video course - I'd buy it =)

@rayalez thank you for your feedback! It is very interesting for me personally. I would not have thought that video tutorials could be better than interactive ones, but it is probably because of my strong personal preferences towards examples / interactive tutorials. On our short roadmap I see new demo scenes only, but we will talk internally about video tutorials tomorrow. If you think you would like to help us with them – by providing ideas or just helping us create them, we would be more than interested in collaborating with you! :)

I would also be very interested in a video tutorial. For me, watching a video is usually my first step - then I would try an interactive tutorial.

Just to say a big thanks from one of us who prefer text.

I know some people prefer video but I strongly prefer text and examples.

Feel free to add video as well, - just wanted you to know at least some of us where happy :-)

Yes, video tutorials are very important for visual tools. I used to prefer books (and still do for digging deep into a tool) but these days to learn anything new in computing I prefer videos. That way I can just see how it works in 30 mins rather than wasting a few hours to setup environment, learn basic stuff and try it out.

If the video intrigues me then I invest time in setting it up and reading the documentation.

I wasn't thinking of a tutorial, but a demo. it's a bit different. The purpose isn't to teach me how to use the tool, but to understand and see what it will look like and what i'll be able to do once / if i ever learn to use it properly.

Then maybe i'll install the software, then i'll go to the tutorials (in that order).

@bsaul, oh I understand. I think we are not there yet. We do not have many ready use cases built in Luna. We will be working with our community to use Luna in real projects / create interesting examples. Then we would build a video showing Luna possibilities.

Right now think about Luna like about a new programming language with rich, visual representation and a very limited set of available libraries. If you are processing data that could be visualized or you are inspecting data, looking for the best way to modify / understand it - Luna could be the tool you are looking for.

I strongly encourage you to play with Luna, see example demo scenes and try to create something from your field of expertise. We would love to help you do it! Use our chat / forum if you have questions / problems. I would be more than happy to later create a video showing your system in work to demonstrate what Luna is suitable for! :)

What do you think about it? :)

This was linked on your site and IMO it's sped up about 5x faster than what I could possibly glean information from: https://vimeo.com/250844656

The real-time speed probably doesn't make for a nice animation but it would definitely be easier to follow.

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