Live data from Hacker News

Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

luna-lang.org

51–60 of 331 posts

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#51
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 kind of plots can you make with this? This has real potential in the big-data and scientific fields. Plotting is hard and if you can easily tie together many data sources and models that are popular onto time series and geospatial plots this will be a winning combo go scientists.

You can connect to our data ANY HTML/JS compatible visualisation. Moreover Luna has some basic (and they are getting better with every day) bindings to drawing over webgl canvas, so you can define visualisations using our nodes. We will be showing examples how to define efficient heatmaps / custom plots using few nodes interactively in Luna. We will be more than happy to collaborate with you and anyone interested in data visualisations soon, so lets stay in touch! :)

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#52
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…

How does this compare to NoFlo?

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#53

Super super cool project! As someone who does robotics, I'm super eager to try this, and to hopefully contribute to some open-source libraries for this. A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion s…

Hi! I'm always very happy to hear that Luna would help in a domain that I personally don't know much about! :) I would be very happy to collaborate with you. Contributing to Luna in any form, including creating libraries is more than welcome and we will do our best to help you achieve your goals with Luna, so let's stay in touch, we are working hard to make release as fast as we can! :)

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#54

Super super cool project! As someone who does robotics, I'm super eager to try this, and to hopefully contribute to some open-source libraries for this. A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion s…

> A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion software, image processing / computer vision, etc. LabVIEW

yep, and I've used Labview (and Simulink, and other graphical editors) in the past for some of this.

Why I'm excited about this is: 1) It's open source, so we can extend it and hack on it as needed. Thos is probably the biggest reason. 2) The dual textual / graphical representation is really useful in cases where you might want to switch between the two, or one makes more sense than the other. You can do some with text in some the other tools, but the last time I tried, it felt like an after thought more than something expressly designed into the language. 3) It looks to be designed as a general programming language, focussing on having a good compiler, good tooling and a nice foreign function interface. My hope is that this means we can incorporate it into our existing code bases easier than labview, where it kind of wants to stand alone. As an example, perhaps I have a large existing codebase for my robot written in C++ with ROS. Perhaps I could use this to create a new ROS node that does my vision pipeline, by taking advantage of the fact it compiles down to native code, and has a foreign function interface designed in from the start. (Or maybe I'm dreaming, but my hope is it would be easier and more performant than doing the same in Labview!) 4) Did I mention open source :-)

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#55
post #44

Why implement a new language rather than a GUI on top of Idris, PureScript or similar? (That aside, very excited!)

We needed to design everything from scratch to make sure the two representations are truly interchangeable. Every design decision in the textual language needs to be backed by its visual counterpart, and we found this way of thinking impossible with any other existing language. Then there is the problem of complexity of existing, typed, functional language. We aim to make things as simple as possible, while not sacrificing the power of types, in order to make the language accessible for a much broader audience. I'm super happy to hear that you like it, make sure to sign-up for our newsletter, so we can stay in touch once Luna is out :).

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#56
post #53

Super super cool project! As someone who does robotics, I'm super eager to try this, and to hopefully contribute to some open-source libraries for this. A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion s…

Hi! I'm always very happy to hear that Luna would help in a domain that I personally don't know much about! :) I would be very happy to collaborate with you. Contributing to Luna in any form, including creating libraries is more than welcome and we will do our best to help you achieve your goals with Luna, so let's stay in touch, we are working hard to make release as fast as we can! :)

Thanks that sounds great! I just signed up for the mailing list, but feel free to reach out to me at any time! (my username @ gmail.com)

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#58

Super super cool project! As someone who does robotics, I'm super eager to try this, and to hopefully contribute to some open-source libraries for this. A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion s…

> A lot of work in robotics involves software that maps to this style well (functional-ish, where data is being pushed through computational pipelines / graphs), and I think this could be a killer development environment for things like control systems, sensor fusion software, image processing / computer vision, etc. LabVIEW

LabVIEW is great, however I'd love to just roughtly outline some important differences:

- Luna works in a purely functional environment, which allows for much more clear and easier to understand graphs. Moreover it enables us to run computations in parallel automatically (without any input from the user, however we will be supporting it very slightly during the first OS release).

- Luna allows you to convert between textual and visual representations - in both ways, always.

- Luna is a real programming language, so it is not just a pack of predefined components. Every component is created out of other components (or functions, you name it), so you can always go as deep as you want or just connect functions from other languages.

- Luna allows you to collaborate in many people on one, visual canvas.

And much more! :)

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#59
post #37
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually we did not run into problems with syntax! The syntax we were presenting last time has changed only slightly. I'd be happy to chat more about it! You can grab me here or message me directly at wojciech at luna-lang.org :)

Fantastic! Will do. Hopping on a plane now but will be in touch.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#60
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I'm always very happy to hear that Luna would help in a domain that I personally don't know much about! :) I would be very happy to collaborate with you. Contributing to Luna in any form, including creating libraries is more than welcome and we will do our best to help you achieve your goals with Luna, so let's stay in touch, we are working hard to make release as fast as we can! :)

Thanks that sounds great! I just signed up for the mailing list, but feel free to reach out to me at any time! (my username @ gmail.com)

Thank you, I will! If something happens and after the release I will accidentally forget about reaching you out, just write me an mail to wojciech at luna-lang.org. I'd be more than happy to collaborate with you! :)
Post reply on HN