Show HN: ChangeOver – A new IDE | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ChangeOver – A new IDE

milansuk.github.io

22 pointsmilansuk10 comments

Hi, author here! As you know software is eating the world. It's a huge market. But only a "few" millions of people can program and the other billions of people are just consumers. With this project, I try to change it. In other words: "IDE as an appliance". ChangeOver is closer to Office software than average IDE.

Please keep in mind it's an alpha version(2nd release), so use-cases are limited. Next build will have drawing functions(graphs, etc.) and better multimedia support.

I'm trying to offer whole platform experience, where IDE, Rendering, GUI, File-system, Network, Database and Interpreter work together as a one piece of software. Please try it and If you like it or even If you don't like it, please send your feedback and feel free to ask questions.

-Milan

One thing that's going to attract non-programmer to this idea is good user experience.

I'd suggest you team up with a UX designer because at the moment it's looking a little like programmer art, and you're trying to appeal to non-programmers :)

It's always good to see someone give a crack to such a hard problem!

Thanks, you're absolutely right! I released the first version 5 weeks ago and It's improving(drag&drop, context menu, multi-select table, etc.)[0][1].

Right now I do everything by myself and it's not easy to jump from compiler to gui, back to the database and so on.

[0] https://milansuk.github.io/ChangeOver/screenshots_build_1/hi... [1] https://milansuk.github.io/ChangeOver/screenshots/high_5.png

Many many years ago I had a small web development business making websites for clients. These clients were typical small to medium sized business. Most of the websites we produced were made with WordPress, because, all our clients wanted to update their own website. However, out of the many clients we had built websites for over the years, only one client actually managed to update their own website by themselves. The others just called us whenever they wanted to update their website and just paid us to do it for them. This was because updating websites was easy for "us" since we did it day in and day out, we had "context" and we "understood" how it worked whereas for our clients, regardless of all they easy buttons they could click, it was still to difficult to operate.

I admire the work you have put in and you've created a great project. But point and click programming will make it easier for "programmers", not for everyone else to write software.

The current version of ChangeOver is like an assembler! I had to go through this painful process to build "base" version. I understand you. What you're seeing right now is just point&click GUI, relational database and point&click programming with REPL. Nothing new. But there will be a lot more. Today's IDEs can finish the words(sometimes lines) for you. ChangeOver will finish your algorithms. Try imagine two cloud apps side by side and you just connect them without using APIs or some 3rd party services like Zapier. And more.

I believe that everyone wants to make their ideas real. And sure, there will be always incidental complexity and people will suffer a little bit. Today's platforms don't really have IDEs, they just tell you: give us file with javascript/python/etc.. Web, Mobile and Desktop apps are mostly fixed for end-user. That's why I really like PowerPoint for it's all in one(run/browse presentation, but also create/edit). Of course, presentations have limited use-cases.

What we need is a new "standard". People don't put Excel on their CVs anymore, because everyone knows it. When you have a problem with a spreadsheet you don't call MS technical support or outsource it like a web development, but you solve it inside the company. Web or WordPress are probably still too complicated.

Where source code hosted? How should I launch app on Linux if I don't know what is inside it?

Right now it's not open-source, but It will be. I did a lot of R&D and because of that, the code needs refactoring and organizing. There are many programs for sandboxing for eg. Firejail[0].

sudo apt-get install firejail

firejail ./ChangeOver-Linux-2

[0]https://firejail.wordpress.com/

No, thanks.

I'll be wait until sources would be published.

It would be helpful if you could expand on what you're trying to accomplish with this.

Especially, I get that it's alpha and the use cases are limited, but what would be the first practical uses of 1.0?

How does it compare to other software? How would it compare to something like HyperCard[1]? What about Jupyter[2] more recently? If Office has VBA, what do you want to do that it can't?

[1]: http://hypercard.org/ [2]: https://jupyter.org/

The biggest difference is no code(text programming). Platforms in same space still require some coding time to time, which is a problem for average computer user. For example to write even a few lines of python code, you have to know tons of things about python. Function's steps in ChangeOver are simple to use and thanks to REPL users can quickly find problems, which non-programmers will do tons. Also, ChangeOver database is to design to handle billions of records. Most of the office programs have problems with scale.

First practical use-case? This is something I struggle a lot. I spend most of the time programming ChangeOver that I forgot to think outside the box. Thank you for sending my mind this way.

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