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Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

luna-lang.org

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Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#21

Post by stormbrew »

indigo0086 wrote: post #16
stormbrew wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those things that always seems like it ought to be the future but for various reasons it doesn't take off. My high school computer class used a programming language called ProGraph[1] that looked a lot like this, but without the text representation, and it was neat but honestly it was more tedious to both read and write anything of even moderate complexity than a pure textual form. [1] https://en.wikip…

For sure without the text representation, or manual code aspect a language would ultimately fail. I feel that languages that seek to "simplify" often oversimplify and leave those that require more granularity (most programmers) not to buy in. These languages can definitely offer a new paradigm on top of existing languages but it requires some fine control to get mind-share and ultimately take off. I'd say the real te…

I fundamentally despise this concept of 'non-devs'. There's just a cyclical definition of non-devs as people who use non-dev tools and vice versa.

It's extremely common to dismiss tools used by certain classes of people as non-programmer tools because of who's using them. Look at Excel, which is basically a visual programming language that probably more people know how to program in than know C. But because your boss or your project manager or your sales rep uses it it gets dismissed.

Never mind that unlike these things that crop up every now and then people get real work done by programming their computer with it.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#22

Post by nikki93 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #17
agentultra wrote: post #10

I find thinking visually to be quite limiting. Although having a mixed textual representation is interesting. I sort of get this with the Moose platform in Pharo which I use for analysis based work. The most painful part of that though is interfacing with foreign systems. And maybe Smalltalk... not a bad language but I've been bitten by the Haskell/Lean/Idris bug. A seamless FFI experience as promised with this langu…

What is text itself but a visual representation of something complex? I repeat, text is intrinsically visual and just a restrictive form of the alternative which is diagramming. Is it a pure coincidence that the english alphabet happens to be the best primitive for representing programming concepts? I believe that there is no coincidence. English is horrible at representing programming concepts. A limited set of char…

What's funny is when we program we use ASCII art (indentation, things like the fact that [ and ] cause symmetric "box" look) to help us. If text was really all we needed, writing minified JS directly would be ok. Given a keyboard and a mouse, this was the fastest way to create nested boxes (ASTs) that have non-tree links (names): type out a serialization of it that your fancy text editor automatically ASCII-artifies.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#23

Post by breck »

Skunkleton wrote: post #7

Here is the snapshot from when this was submitted to HN about a year and a half ago: http://archive.is/V2VwE My question: what has changed? Has anyone addressed any of the fundamental questions that were posed last time this was submitted? Are there any concrete examples of how you might use this for general purpose programming?

My guess is they ran into problems with syntax. If they alter their language slightly to be an ETN, it could help. Happy to chat more if any of them are reading.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#24

Post by nikki93 »

agentultra wrote: post #20
crimsonalucard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is text itself but a visual representation of something complex? I repeat, text is intrinsically visual and just a restrictive form of the alternative which is diagramming. Is it a pure coincidence that the english alphabet happens to be the best primitive for representing programming concepts? I believe that there is no coincidence. English is horrible at representing programming concepts. A limited set of char…

Math. When learning graph theory it can be quite useful at first. But once you start using set theory the graphical representation actually hides more information than it gives and intuition starts to get in the way of us discovering useful properties.

IMO the graphical representation some times removes accidental complexity by not needing names or producing orderings. eg. To write a non-tree graph you always need to introduce local names unless you use something like SKI combinators. When proving the Kuratowski-Wagner theorem for example, I'm pretty sure the diagrams and the language-form help each other without either being strictly better.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#25

Post by tree_of_item »

gramstrong wrote: post #11
thecity2 wrote: post #4

I like the idea of category-oriented programming. Would be interested to see a white paper on what that means.

I'm not sure what the idea even means, or if it really warrants a separate paradigm than OOP. Is it related to category theory? Frustrated that a 'new' paradigm got dropped on me with only a couple sentences of explanation.

It's bogus, they just wanted to use the word "category" to try and lure in FP enthusiasts.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#26

Post by wdanilo »

Hi guys! My name is Wojciech Danilo and I'm one of the founders of Luna. The timing for this news is a little unfortunate, because we are just before releasing Luna as an Open Source project! However, it's great time to answer some questions and give you a short update what has happened for the last couple months:

1. We've raised a seed round of $1M, so we can safely focus on product development and shortly on community building! 2. We've improved our core technologies to be much more robust, open and extensible, including:

- We've re-written our graphical interface to be much more open and extensible (it was previously running on WebGL and now we base just on HTML, so it will be possible to attach any HTML-compatible controls / visualisations directly to nodes) - We've implemented new, better type inferencer and updated Luna compiler in many ways. - And much much more, but I don't want to uncover everything before the release, especially when it's around the corner :)

I would love to answer your questions, so If you've got any, just post it here and I'll do my best to cover it. Don't forget to singup for the list at http://luna-lang.org. We'd love to collaborate with you during the upcoming release! :)

Cheers, Wojciech

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#27

Post by halflings »

This is similar to Knime [0], which lets you build "workflows" visually, and allow you to write custom blocks with Python or Java. The main difference seems that you can represent the whole workflow in a human-readable (and writable) format.

https://www.knime.org/example-workflows

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#30

Post by aaron-lebo »

wdanilo wrote: post #26

Hi guys! My name is Wojciech Danilo and I'm one of the founders of Luna. The timing for this news is a little unfortunate, because we are just before releasing Luna as an Open Source project! However, it's great time to answer some questions and give you a short update what has happened for the last couple months: 1. We've raised a seed round of $1M, so we can safely focus on product development and shortly on commun…

What is your business model?
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