Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

deepui.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 136 posts

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#111

Post by TuringTest »

immigrantsheep wrote: post #77
TuringTest wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SublimeText, AbletonLive or Photoshops are not platforms where you create an automated software artifact that runs on top of the tool. On top of a programming language, however, you depend on the tool being always available without major changes for as long as you need it to remain stable. This is not guaranteed on a privative development platform. They are simply not in the same class of products at all. In all your…

Stupid as all those people building games with Unity? Or all those people who used to use Unreal/UDK before v4 while there was no source code available? Anyway not here looking to start a flame war. My point was that the product can be good or bad and it doesn't have anything to do with it's source code being available or not. My 5c. Everyone feel free to disagree.

Games is one kind of software where you usually won't expect to keep your code base maintained 10 or 20 years from now. So far for the "stable platform" argument where you as a user wouldn't want anything less than open source code, unless forced to use proprietary code for external reasons.

There might be a cost/benefit analysis where some closed platform is extremely far ahead in every other aspect, but you should be very well aware of the risks of being tied to that platform.

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#112

Post by wtetzner »

dmvaldman wrote: post #70
dragonwriter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't, however, try to understand what "thought" is, and work backwards to form a representation of it. Yes, we do. ML/AI is a moving target that literally represents the current SOTA in doing just that, and even symbolic logic itself is the outcome of an older, a priori , way of doing that. Actually, analytic diagrams are also an outcome of one approach to that. So, all programming methods you mention come from…

Perhaps I spoke too broadly. You're right, many disciplines try to understand thought. From CS to philosophy to neuroscience to psychology etc. My real point is that thought is not visual or textual. Those things are simply ways of transmitting thoughts. When I have a thought, and I write it down, and you read it, I am simply hoping you are now having a thought related to the one I had. Some interaction in your brain…

> Now we are trying to create a shared language between humans and computers, where we both understand each other with minimal effort.

The tricky part is that it needs to be a shared language between humans, computers, and other humans, if we want software to be maintainable.

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#114

Post by brianberns »

taneq wrote: post #106
brianberns wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the move towards functional programming, and putting the onus on developers to do the mental elbow grease of converting what are largely macro-style tasks (do this, do that) into functional code (feed this transform into this one) has done a great disservice to software engineering, especially with respect to productivity. I think you've got this exactly backwards. Functional programming lets you think at a…

I don't think that data flow is a higher level of abstraction to control flow. They're just different types of abstraction, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. If you only ever work on things that map well to functional programming then you'll naturally think it's superior to imperative programming. Likewise, if you only ever work on things that map well to imperative programming, then the functional programmi…

Implementing an algorithm in a functional language almost always requires less code than implementing the same algorithm in an imperative language. That is direct evidence that functional languages are more abstract.

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#115

Post by dkersten »

I found the video quite confusing.

It seems like its great for things that have an on-screen spatial meaning like the pong example game[1]. But what if I want to represent something abstract?

Like a tree (lets say a quad-tree since this is for (2d?) games for now)? Or what if I want to implement AI logic (lets say I want some kind of decision-tree planner and path finding)? I'm having trouble visualising (I guess because the video didn't really go to explain) how any of this can be done, as opposed to "moving something around on the screen".

I assume this has been thought about. I just couldn't figure out any of the details from the video.

[1] although even in that case, I couldn't figure out what the symbols and lines in the video meant. The symbols especially seem cryptic. A mix between logic gates and something else?

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#116

Post by dkersten »

mastazi wrote: post #90
IshKebab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually disagree about the fullscreen video. Why would I ever want to watch video not fullscreen? Vimeo also behaves like this on mobile and it's far superior to Youtube, which often totally hides the fullscreen button.

> Why would I ever want to watch video not fullscreen? Because the way they are doing it there is no minimize button. A less technically inclined person may not know that they have to press Escape (and now, it seems, some laptops have no hardware Esc button at all). In addition, the first time I played it, for some reason, Esc did not work and I had to Alt-Tab in order to leave the video.

I didn't check what this looks like on mobile, but I do the majority of my browsing on an iPad and while I use a physical keyboard with it, it doesn't have an escape button.

Presumably, this would use the usual mobile video player though, which does have a minimise button, so its likely not a real issue (I'm not on iPad right now so didn't check).

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#117

Post by dkersten »

Naeron wrote: post #48
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #44

Is it just me? Or does this look 10 times geekier than writing actual code? I think the project is trying to be a user friendly way of writing programs, and I think that's an awesome idea, but the actual product looks otherwise. I finished the video and still have no idea what the hell was going on through out the entire video.

There is a plan for a lengthier explanation video. The intention of the video was to show that it can be done. Of course, some kind of explanation and training is needed for everything, I don't dispute that.

My problem with the video is that it doesn't show me what can be done. It shows me that the ball can follow the line and with some magical symbols and lines "other logic" can be "somehow" added. It didn't do anything to tell me what other logic is possible, nor did it explain what the symbols and lines mean. So I still don't really know _what_ can be done (besides a pong game) and I've no idea what most of the on screen stuff even is or means.

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#118

Post by dkersten »

MattRix wrote: post #101
Naeron wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need the money to develop it fully. If it was usable at this point, I would release it, no doubt. I want something out of the door ASAP, that's why it is focusing on 2D games first. That is feasible but still hard. This is really not a technology in the traditional sense. The runtime itself is nothing new. The real thing is the UX, that is how programming can be made more efficient to do. I believe if someone suppo…

I love the idea of it... but the video makes it very hard to see how it works. I believe it's possible to show how this works without it actually working right now. I think you might be focusing too much on making it look good and polished, you need to just make it work, bare bones!

I believe it's possible to show how this works without it actually working right now.

Exactly! A short tutorial using screenshots to explain what stuff means, for example, would go a long way and doesn't actually require anything to be implemented as the screenshots could be mocked up.

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#119

Post by DonaldFisk »

TuringTest wrote: post #110
DonaldFisk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if you write it? I'm happy with non-commercial use (including providing the source), but if someone wants to make money from software I write, it's only fair that they should pay me, and under the open source model they don't have to, and usually they won't.

That argument is convenient for you, but how is it convenient for the people using your code?

The only people who would be inconvenienced by it are those who can make money out of it. Anyone who agrees not to use it commercially can still receive it, source included, gratis, when it's ready for release.

If a commercial user likes my software they can pay for it or hire me. (I'm available). Is that too much to ask?

Re: Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio – A different approach to programming

#120

Post by eggy »

seanparsons wrote: post #107
zackmorris wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya I'm not knocking functional programming (I prefer it as well) but I find it frustrating that so much of it breaks from the conventions we are accustomed to in C-style languages. Others around me can’t easily grok what I’ve written. Functional logic is the solution to the problem being tackled, but currently it has to be generated by hand, often in a write-only style. We are effectively writing functional assembly.…

This is a more fundamental issue though, we(the software industry as a whole) need to throw off the shackles of languages like C. Swift is probably one of the worst examples when it comes to functional programming because it's still a C like language with some FP like things in the stdlib. So you get none of the advantages and some inconsistencies weighing it down.

Yes, I agree that Swift is 'too C-like', and besides, I was looking at Kotlin first, and it seems almost exactly the same syntactically. I like the J programming language, which allows for very small programs due to the composing and abstracting of functions. J's use of high-level abstraction using ASCII characters to represent functions (operators - verbs, adverbs, nouns...) seems to scare a lot of people away from it. The irony is of course the move towards array-computing hardware, GPUs and FPGAs that lend themselves for a perfect match with array-based languages like APL/J/K/Kona and other, and yet we mold array/vector libraries or patches to the C-style languages to enable programming GPUs People get comfortable with their PLs like their native tongue. It's why I would hear Westerners think a Chinese child was being particularly whiny compared to their own children or other Western children, when in reality the Cantonese-speaking child was saying the same type of things. Being American and understanding some of what the child was saying in Cantonese allowed me to make that observation, and fully realize how our comforts and preconceptions operate on how we perceive others and the world. This is why I try to be multilingual in PLs and spoken languages.

DeepUI seems like yet another way to tackle implementing our goals in a different language, and thereby also gain understanding into how we 'normally' do it.

Post reply on HN