You make
so many salient points, I'm like a kid in a candy shop thinking of what to speak to. But in order to avoid writing a book, I'll just address your two main points.
First, the notion of the pre-canned functions for nodes: That's one of the really novel things about ibGib, is that there is an infinite number of possible functions that can be "performed on" each node. Any node combined with any other node, and we're all nodes, our programs are nodes, etc. Currently, programmers micro-manage this in a locally addressed memory space. What I've discovered recently is that my design is actually like a universally sized turing complete language. One of the earlier conscious design decisions I made was that ib^gib are cheap and data itself is expensive. This is essentially the same decision when dealing with pointers and memory...You "just" pass around pointers and the actual thing can be dereferenced to get the value (also it's immutable, also it maintains integrity, and more and more, I have to stop though or I'll keep going). So basically, my point is that dealing with the pre-canned function aspect is essentially just creating a new language...but why a new language and what is different?
Which brings me to my second point about the "low friction way of amassing (and sharing) a library of function nodes...": My design also ends up coinciding in many ways to GitHub's hashes (which I only realized after the fact when explaining this system to a brother of mine). But fundamentally ibGib is unique! Whereas GitHub (and everything else like it) thinks in terms of files and folders, dealing with diffing files, ibGib works at the conceptual/semantic level thinking of everything in terms of ibGib. You don't "create a new" ibGib or "new up" an ibGib. You fork an existing ibGib (any existing ibGib), and when you are forking a "blank", then you are actually forking the "Root". This conceptually has profound implications, but the end product is that you are forking, mut8ing, and rel8ing at an atomic level, the atomicity part being totally up to the ibGib that is combining state. For now, that's just my ibGib engine on my server, but really it's anything that takes in an ibGib and outputs an ibGib. So imagine you went to GitHub and not just forked a library, but forked a single function/class in that library. ibGib's data structure keeps a complete dependency graph (in the form of rel8ns to the ib^gib pointers) for every single ibGib. So if you have to make a change to some aspect, you fork it and make the change and now you're using the fork.
There are issues of complexity arising at this level of granularity though, which is partly why I'm working very slowly on concrete goals. The first one is the "Note Taking" app, which already is phenomenally useful (the videos I have don't really touch it). I'm dogfooding it every day, and though it obviously has limitations, it's extremely easy to use (as long as I don't get my micro t2 limit, now upgraded to a small on aws hah). Also to address the granularity though is how easily this system incorporates AI/machine learning, etc. This is because it's essentially a Big Data architecture on top of everything else. You create nodes that operate on projections of nodes that creates other nodes.
And I've already written so much, but I had to also mention that your "higher-level canvas" is a dependency graph projection of ibGib. Just today I've implemented tagging ibGib (which you can see on my github repo on my issue branch). Anyway, thanks for your response, and I'd love to talk more with you and anyone else about this because I think it's really exciting :-O, since it actually ties together many many things fundamentally: logic, physics, mathematics, AI, religion...the list goes on and on. Feel free to create an issue on my repo and we'll mark it as discussion, question, etc. After I've gotten a couple more features in place I plan on doing a Show HN.
Also I apologize to the DeepUI people as I'm using their thread to talk about ibGib (so I'm cutting it off here!). I have to mention that their video to me looks really awesome, and it reminds me of the MIT Scratch program (https://scratch.mit.edu/). But like others have mentioned on this thread, I also was totally confused as to how one would actually use it. But I love front end magic and polish, since that is what I severely lack!