Fabric Project | Hacker News Reader

Fabric Project

github.com

65 pointsbrcmthrowaway26 comments

I've always been weirded out by these "programming by connecting boxes" environments. In my experience, the only benefit they bring is removing the need to understand the syntax, which is the simplest part of programming, at the cost of making it much more complicated to find out the boxes, figure out what can connect where, looking up documentation, etc.

Interestingly, I don't get this feeling with Snap! or Scratch. Sure, they're not designed for me, but they're intuitive, and they just work.

Not sure where the disconnect lies. Quite possibly in my brain.

> In my experience, the only benefit they bring is removing the need to understand the syntax

It also offers better discovery—an additional major barrier if you aren't used to fighting documentation.

In my experience, the discovery is much worse, because now, I need to look at all the menus (or tabs, etc.), which makes me see many terms I don't understand, instead of being able to simply search in the documentation.

I've had the same experience with the Unreal IDE, for instance, vs. Bevy (or Pygame, etc.)

But yeah, you may be right that for people not used to documentation, this might be less bad.

Maybe one advantage is there aren’t things like syntax errors to deal with, or naming things. The structure makes things purely functional and allows for multiple outputs from a block as well as optional inputs. Seems to me that it removes a lot of the incidental complexity in writing shaders (syntax, linear structure, specifying inputs, imperative shader language, etc)

Speaking of Apple platforms, yeah, this was my big problem with Interface Builder. I couldn’t get anywhere with serious Apple platforms development until SwiftUI came along.

Fabric is a extremely overused name.

They should have called it Atlas :)

LOL that indeed feels more common

Every big tech company probably has a project called Atlas.

Should have a better name. There is Fabric, a library in Python, microsoft's SaaS offering

Also a popular Minecraft modding framework https://fabricmc.net/

I hoped it was this one when clicking.

Everything has collisions unless it's an invented word. And even then, you might find prior art.

Microsoft also called their new replacement for Synapse Fabric. So Microsoft has at least two projects named Fabric.

Is there a good resource on naming things? Or a catalogue of brilliant names?

A great resource for naming things is to use google once you think you have a good name. It really doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

The problem is that coming up with good names is difficult. What I need is a quick way to get to " think you have a good name"

I've found that AI is decent at this.

That's a rather obscure conflict, when you think that the two have no domain overlap

I see fabric python library (open source ssh automation) https://pypi.org/project/fabric/

No connection to microsoft.

Link to rendered samples: https://fabric-project.github.io/showcase.html

Note the samples link in github goes to the .fabric samples, not rendered ones.

Is it realtime?

I like the name fabric. But i agree it has been used alot. Loom would be my proposal if anyone is looking for suggestion. You have to connect so many things to achieve simple things easy for starters but its putting up on a disadvantage here. I would say.

Is there anything similar that is not limited to Apple?

https://tixl.app

Looks like too many boxes needed for simple things.

another fabric?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com