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

Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

luna-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 331 posts

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#221

Post by agumonkey »

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…

inspirations please ? brett victor ? dataflow / node based modeling ? others ?

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#222

Post by jmull »

simplify wrote: post #187
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it does, because you are clearly just a snob. its so obvious that people are just looking for reasons to hate javascript when they post shit like your dumb example. though i concede that is a pretty hilarious "wat". virtually all the dumb "gotchas" never show up, and the real gotchas are learned early, just like other languages. you are like a classical musician who thinks every other kind of music is not real and ea…

Sorry dude, I'm going to have to step in; you're being too strong in your counter attitude. I've been writing and teaching JavaScript professionally for many years, and while I don't hate the language, I don't blame those who do. After learning and using a statically typed language, it becomes absurd how much effort you have to put in to debug a JavaScript type error – a problem that is amplified by the language desi…

(just going' down this rabbit hole with you all)

The problem I have with static typing (as widely implemented) is it solves little problems at the cost of arbitrary inflexibility which ends up rippling through a code base.

And the little problems are better solved in other ways. E.g., unit tests and the like catch type errors on the way to validating that your code actually does what you think it should do.

Static typing also isn't useful when dealing with data that moves through distributed systems. You know, like pretty much all the data. The static types you had at compile time are fundamentally not related to the data you are processing at run time and static types don't equip you to deal with that very well. Systems map "wild" incoming data to the internal static types but the static type environments strongly encourage this to happen early, which is often not the right place.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#223

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

agentultra wrote: post #205
crimsonalucard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this visual stuff is perfect for functional (math based) programming as composed expressions aren't easily readable as english. I find language to be better suited for imperative procedures. Think about it, I have a list of tasks, do I write that list in ordered English bullet points or do I draw a diagram?

I find simple math to be much more elegant and easier to comprehend then a jumbled visual diagram. It's much easier to understand a universal quantification in a standard notation than reasoning by visual analogies. Programming languages tend to be a little less expressive and elegant. They're more complicated too. For reasons of course... but I don't think I'm going to be writing algorithms and data-structures in su…

Are you familiar with category theory? I've been finding it very helpful for processing things visually. Considering this is "category oriented programming," I'm betting they find it helpful, too ;)

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#224

Post by reitanqild »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #206
it_learnses wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you deserve more public shaming than him. Sure he hates javascript and has valid reasons to do so. You, on the other hand are so insecure (probably because you've spent years using this language), that you have to make personal attacks.

well i can tell this is turning into the bad kind of internet commenting. you are calling me insecure- thats a personal attack. is it wrong to call someone a snob for being snobby?

is it wrong to call someone a snob for being snobby?

I'm not a snob. I grew up on a small farm. I can milk the cows and have moved a few tons of grass by hand because the barn was to small for machinery.

I still strongly dislike javascript.

Maybe you could respect our right to hate or at least strongly dislike a language that

1. Is being forced upon us as the coolest thing since I don't know what

2. has quite complicated and IMO dumb ideas about equality like

2.1. http://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/

2.2. https://stackoverflow.com/a/359509

3. Feels like it changes major parts of one of the build systems every second week

?

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#225

Post by wdanilo »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #219
wdanilo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@CyberDildonics, I think that @indescions_2017 was referring to pipelines suitable to be run inside game engines, working at "runtime", not batch-processing data upfront. You cannot utilize any of the software you mentioned to do it. You can use Houdini engine, but it's image processing capabilities are super limited currently and even if they improve, you are limited to thinking in the context of SOPs, DOPs, CHOPs e…

Actually Houdini's COPs are very capable, I use them all the time. Also you can define custom procedures/nodes using vex as text or as a separate node interface.

I know Houdini very well, I've been writing plugins to it for years. Vex is capable of handling complex expressions, but it is still limited to predefined 20 or 30 types and you cannot extend it (you can in a hackish way using some C++ interface, but lets assume that this is just too hackish). This also effects the UX of Houdini, you can often see nodes with 30 or 50 inputs that look strange (like the std material definition). If you are able to define custom types, you can collapse related parameters into new types.

I'm not talking COPs or Houdini is something bad. It is one of the few applications that I support with whole heart and I love it. In fact Houdini is a very rare example of really well defined visual DSL.

Luna differs in many ways, the most important are that we've got double representation and Luna is a real programming language, while Houdini provides you limited set of building, yet very powerful blocks. I would however love to see Luna used within Houdini as a plugin, I've been already speaking about it with some folks :)

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#226

Post by loup-vaillant »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #183
wdanilo wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the_cat_kittles I did not wanted to hurt your feelings. Of course it is a language. By saying it is not I just wanted to express my strong anty-JS feelings, but they are of course very subjective :)

cool, i didnt want to hurt your feelings, just point out that you are a baseless snob

If I had to guess, I would point out that JavaScript was originally hacked out in 10 days, and features a number of unforgivable flaws, such as a non-transitive equality operator, weird implicit conversions, or just plain trying to make sense of quite obviously nonsensical operations.

To someone used to the mathematical rigour of typed functional languages, this is not even worth looking at. As far as I know, the success of JavaScript had nothing to do with its qualities as a language. It was timing and market forces. It was there, so people used it.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't want to disparage Brendan Eich. I couln't do a tenth of what he did in 10 days. It's just that you get what you pay for. They should have taken the time to fix JavaScript's flaws instead of marketing the hell out of it right away. (Or should have they? Maybe JavaScript would have failed if released a few months later? Damned market. Damned path dependence.)

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#227

Post by wdanilo »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #220
wdanilo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot embed touchdesigner in a game engine (at last with ease). VVVV does not comes with abstraction over DOPs SOPs etc, but both are still very limited regarding what datatypes they can process.

Can you embed this in a game engine?

Are you asking about Luna? :) Sure! Luna comes currently with its VM but we are also working on a backend allowing to compile it to machine code, so every graph you write can be also used as a library and called for example from C.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#228

Post by wdanilo »

agumonkey wrote: post #221
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…

inspirations please ? brett victor ? dataflow / node based modeling ? others ?

Houdini, Haskell, Python, Ruby, MaxMSP. I think these were the strongest influencers.

Re: Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language

#229

Post by jamiek88 »

wdanilo wrote: post #105
bluetwo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in seeing how an open source programming language/platform with a clean GUI will evolve. Curious to see this in a year!

We are also super curious and we hope it will shine. If you hope for it too, let's contribute! We'd love to work with you to polish it as much as possible! :)

Is there a way for a beginning developer to help?

Maybe with documentation? I could at least help with editing / proof reading and the drudge work you guys are too talented to be doing! Your time is much better spent on the core development.

Post reply on HN