Comment by angleofrepose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angleofrepose | Hacker News Reader

I've been following Ronin and the author for a few years now from a distance. As I have said in other threads on hn about this work, the theme and ethos are so consistent and thorough they just slap you in the face. You know exactly what is going on with Ronin, Oscean, Orca and it is a pleasure to see such clear manifestation of intent.

Ronin in particular is the most fascinating piece of this network to me. I was hooked by the (broken) version 1.0 when I first found it a couple years ago and played around a bit with fixing it. It played well with a few other key influences in my life and I've been playing around with similar--albeit prototype--systems ever since.

To name one stand out feature. I have been playing around with generative design/creative coding/coding art for a while now and I seem to be on an edge of the domain. My work lately has been increasingly taking a set of starter points, so to speak. I have shapes or layouts in my head that I want to run through the generative process, but I am distinctly starting with these hard coded values.

Ronin provides direct manipulation on the canvas with `$` prefixes in the code. If you type `$point`, then click on the canvas, "$point" is replaced with code representing that point. The simplicity of this interface for writing code that heavily involves numbers in context (ie on their domain) is an inspiration. There are probably a couple of names for this connectivity, but one might be bi-directional evaluation. Manipulations in code yield the canvas, and manipulations on the canvas yield code.

There's a lot going on here, xxiivv.com

And some fun to be learned by poking through git commits. If you know Orca, (was popular here a while back) it didn't start as a music generation system.

Edit:

Ronin tutorial video, 5:22. First 30s tease the original version I saw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgAWGh1s9zg

Old version tutorial/demo 4:09 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gifzjhyBwOc

Check out acme/plan9. Lots of similar cursor/content/programming synergies.

There are entire parallel end user computing universes out there that we have barely scratched the surface of.

There is a plan9 and acme demo on YouTube which is eye opening. One idea that has captured me is the idea that end users ought to be able to create custom UIs. This appears to be a foundational principle of plan9, the way all text is able to be executed. Another avenue for this idea are ZUIs as originally envisioned. Individual clipboard state can be reified as buttons in the UI, any formatting or pens or fonts can also be manifested in the interface and selected with something along the lines of the "eyedropper" tool present in many applications.

edit: video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M "A Tour of the Acme Editor" by Russ Cox

Sounds a lot like some of the macro tools in Emacs, all told. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ed... has the general vision of showing so keyboard interactions. I don't know why this couldn't include mouse events.

I agree, thanks for pointing me to that info page. I would bet that keys representing functions probably evolved simultaneously with the first computer typewriters, they've been around forever and are "obvious" to some degree. Making functions apparent in menus is also probably synonymous with the first non text-based GUIs. I don't know enough about the history of toolkits, but as far as I can tell that area of development is nowhere near mainstream today.

I have been reading Sutherland's Sketchpad thesis, and it struck me that no aspect of the system was unavailable to the user. By itself, this isn't entirely unusual, I think the same could be argued for emacs or linux in various ways or even of software when code is available etc. The unique aspect of this universal control with regard to sketchpad is that it was a graphical system. Controls for the graphics and viewport were essential, and reflected by the development of the first oop principles of master/instance and recursive expansion of arbitrary material in the workspace. Of multiple viewport movement controls (physical dials too!) and focus-selection zooming.

It is easy to imagine extensions of sketchpad with graphical macros. Of savable viewport state, of non-euclidean jumps between locations on the digital "paper".

It's funny to me that most clever things I enjoy about vim seem like they could fit right into a graphical system like sketchpad. `mkview`, marks, folds, repeat operations, contextual movement or selection like accessed via combinations of `[{(`.

Infinite canvas artboards are fantastic workspaces, but lack even the basic "focus shifting ability" of a few stacks of paper on a desk, taped on a wall, or strewn across the floor.

The thing I like about the best parts of vim and emacs is how much it feels like a conversation with the computer. Such that it natural lends itself to interacting with completed things. Indeed, "ciw" only works if you have a completed "word" to change.

Notebooks are usually tons and tons of fragments. Such that a precise dialog with them feels very difficult. I agree it would be awesome, but I have yet to see something that doesn't just harken to the ultimate failures of graphical programming languages. Neat for performance style programming. But needing a ton of rehearsal to get a performance.

It sounds very cool, but I hit a brick wall almost immediately when I tried to use it: how do I run a script? The tutorial video says you type cmd-R but that just reloads the page when you're running it in Firefox.

It's probably fair to say this software isn't the most user friends as a result of its continuous change. In chrome and firefox Control-Enter runs the web app version I find here: https://hundredrabbits.github.io/Ronin/

It seems the keyboard shortcuts are shown in the menu.

The author is a reasonable person. The community is as poisonous as hell. Two people in the slack group made many to leave. Nothing has been done yet. A few years ago, they removed a friend of mine. Because the two men turned their eyes on them like the malicious Sauron.

The output is interesting. Remove yourself as far as possible from the community.

What are the issues with the community?

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