Thank you! <3
546 karma · joined October 5, 2014
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wojciechdanilo https://twitter.com/wojciech_danilo
We would love to help you create what you need!
What do you think about it?
Luna is a visual language. It is important for us. How it looks like, how it behaves, how you feel with it, how fast you can work in it - these are the things which are most important when designing Luna. In fact, because of these things we have designed a new language instead of using existing one - then we would have to sacrifice some visual elements / behaviors and we do not want to do it.
We are small team, please support us as much as you can! If you want to see Luna succeed, help us do it by contributing to the project - both ideas as well as help with its development are very welcome! And I promise, we will do what we can to make Luna the most powerful and beautiful visual language ever created :)
Your sentence about visual languages that tend to live in a very niche places is a VERY important topic to me. In fact I think I've got a very crisp answer why it is happening:
1) Visual languages are mostly not open and free.
2) Most visual languages are designed for a very specific domain use cases (like sound processing, 3d graphics, etc). People are afraid of limitations! Unless I'm 100% sure that I'm working exactly in this niche, if I want to process data / create software I would never choose a domain specific visual language, because the probability I'll hit its limitations are too high to take the risk. This is why we have developed Luna as a real programming language, so literally if you are able to do anything in C, you should be able to do it in Luna!
3) Almost every visual language is designed just as components you can connect. That's it, they are not tightly integrated with textual representation. This often makes working in these languages tedious - you have to create many nodes to achive what you can within a single line. In Luna, however, you can use any expression to create node. You can for example create node `(2 + _).sqrt`. You will get a node, which will allow you to connect one input and send data to the missing place in expression. It allows you to keep your graph clean and small.
Moreover, we have described in detail why current visual languages fail to succeed in our blog post here: https://medium.com/@luna_language/luna-the-visual-way-to-cre...
What do you think about it?
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? :)
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?
However, I do not agree with your point that people don't want to code with mouse. Actually, connecting high level components visually, tweaking their parameters (with sliders, color choosers and other widgets) and observing how it affects the result you got is MUCH faster than writing code. There is of course some "base level". If you code something low-level it is much better to use code then. Where this "base level" is, depends on you and your preferences.
I would love to hear more from you after you try Luna and try to create something more complex in it! :)
Does it make sense to you?
Did I address your concerns?
2. We know that such settings are not the best for everyone, especially for developers older than about 40 years. We would our best to provide appropriate settings, so you can either increase the contrast or change the theme to white one (or write your custom theme from scratch). In fact, if you navigate right now to our theme settings you can already see some contrast settings. They do not work properly yet, but you can see that we are slowly working in that direction. However, we do not want to just "increase the contrast". There is a lot of people who prefer lower contrast, as we ship right now. We want to do it the right way, so you will have control and will be able to easily fine tune the GUI to your preferences.
3.I've read the research you mention. It states in particular, that when your irises are more closed, it is much easier for you to track corners and edges, however your eyes are getting tired easier. Working with white theme a whole day could be a pain, so we started with default dark theme. It is also affected by our personal preference, but as I described above, it is VERY important to us to make Luna easy to work with for everybody in all conditions, which also includes white, high-contrast themes. Please, keep in mind that it will need some time to develop. We are still a small team and we've got some high-priority things on our checklist right now, like improving the typechecking performance.
4. Our docs provide white PDF, but also the HTML version provides a white theme - just click on the "A" latter icon on top of the docs and switch to the light theme there! :)
5. Proportional fonts are a little tricky by definition. The question is - if you really want to use them when writing code. What I mean is that what you write above ndoes could be any code snippet. It could be just a function name, but could also be any expression like `2+2`. We are currently synchronizing the text editor font with nodes font, so if you use monospaced font in your editor, the same font will appear above the nodes. Do you think it is a wrong approach? If so, how would you change it? The best way to tell us about it is to create a github issue / discussion about it.
6. As I described above, we are small team of developers on a mission to bring something incredible for data processing. We are very open for any improvement suggestions. Any suggestsion regarding how the GUI looks like and how readible it is, is very, very important to us. This topic is tricky, because we want to provide flexibility over how the GUI looks like. We would be also very thankful for any help on helping us improve it. So if you tell more about what you think on github issues, we can continue the disusion there. We will tell you in detail what are our ideas and we could then choose the one that is the best (allowing everyone to set up the theme for hes own preferences).
Thank you once again and im looking forward to hearing from you! :)
Answering a little more serious, the installation path on any Unix system is described in our documentation here: https://luna-lang.gitbooks.io/docs/content/installation.html :)