is this webpage really slow and hard to scroll for anyone else?
Me too. Chrome 59 on a Mac.
Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#22There's looking to be a lot of value in visual languages - this isn't the first one to hit the FP in the last few weeks. We're probably beginning to appreciate the limits of text-based programming, and hopefully enough work goes into something different to create a tool with real productivity using visual code. The only trouble I can see is that there isn't a lot of speed at the moment in dragging and dropping to cre…
I've been going back and forth on this for a while as I work on a product that allows users to build applications in a drag and drop visual manner.
What I've seen is that while novices fairly quickly ramp up and get productive generating basic CRUD apps rapidly, they also rapidly hit a wall in two ways:
1. It can be hard or cumbersome to express more complex logic 2. The drag and drop interface often leads people to -assume- what the runtime will do.
Right now, I'm leaning toward feeling that visualization should be a tool to understand the _behavior_ of what one has written, but not necessarily the thing one manipulates to express a program. Ballerina seems to be this, so I'm excited there!
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#23There's looking to be a lot of value in visual languages - this isn't the first one to hit the FP in the last few weeks. We're probably beginning to appreciate the limits of text-based programming, and hopefully enough work goes into something different to create a tool with real productivity using visual code. The only trouble I can see is that there isn't a lot of speed at the moment in dragging and dropping to cre…
I currently have the "pleasure" of building a SharePoint workflow, which is done by clicking together building blocks in a graphical builder (running as part of Visual Studio).
Maybe I am generalizing to hastily, but I absolutely despise the experience. In theory it sounds like a nice concept, in practice it tends to make trivial tasks exceedingly complicated[1]. And what would be a screen of code is several screens full of a block diagram. It is possible to zoom out, but text gets unreadable fairly quickly.
[1] To be fair, I think that is probably more of SharePoint problem, whose complexity would be hilarious if I did not have to deal with it.
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#24There's looking to be a lot of value in visual languages - this isn't the first one to hit the FP in the last few weeks. We're probably beginning to appreciate the limits of text-based programming, and hopefully enough work goes into something different to create a tool with real productivity using visual code. The only trouble I can see is that there isn't a lot of speed at the moment in dragging and dropping to cre…
I currently have the "pleasure" of building a SharePoint workflow, which is done by clicking together building blocks in a graphical builder (running as part of Visual Studio). Maybe I am generalizing to hastily, but I absolutely despise the experience. In theory it sounds like a nice concept, in practice it tends to make trivial tasks exceedingly complicated[1]. And what would be a screen of code is several screens…
You'd probably appreciate the movie Zero Theorem. The hero, a coder, is doing the same procedure...it's by the Monty Python people.
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#25is this webpage really slow and hard to scroll for anyone else?
Pretty slow for me on Linux Chrome 59. I think there's some JS trying to "smooth" the scrolling (or at least that's how it looks) and/or handling those scroll animations at the top/bottom of the page, but affecting scrolling everywhere.
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#26There's looking to be a lot of value in visual languages - this isn't the first one to hit the FP in the last few weeks. We're probably beginning to appreciate the limits of text-based programming, and hopefully enough work goes into something different to create a tool with real productivity using visual code. The only trouble I can see is that there isn't a lot of speed at the moment in dragging and dropping to cre…
It seems to me the next "graphical language" interface should be more like working in an IDE, but instead of entering the text directly and having the hints provided - we reverse the problem and only allow the user to enter what is allowed by the syntax of the language.
That would essentially generalise to "creating visual code", only now it would use the keyboard instead of the mouse.
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#27This actually does look great. There's real value here. In a world being overrun with services what's desperately needed is an orchestration language. Such a language is severely focused on consuming services/messages, converting data, and then uploading data/messages. This is the next Unix shell; a tool whose only purpose would be to stitch together services, pipe data, schedule execution, and display results. An in…
Ballerina is designed exactly for that; to be the Unix shell of the Internet basically. Deep understanding of JSON, XML, MIME, SQL etc., networked execution naturally, parallelism naturally, resiliency, etc.. Only time will tell whether we get the mix right.
The built in JSON type is a real killer feature for me: https://github.com/ballerinalang/ballerina/blob/master/docs/...
Dealing with JSON objects in Java has been a pain which often caused me to pick Node.js. I always wanted another typed language that supports JSON literals...
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#28"Ballerina, TCL with a quazi-Golang syntax"
I'm curious to know why you think there is a tcl connection? Not saying there isn't, just don't see it myself
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#29Does this language do animations to elucidate the flow of data?
Not yet .. but we have a design for tracing the execution flow of every run at near zero cost and then playing back the execution trace. That's not saving all intermediate state but if you save the input (usually an HTTP request; so its saved in the logs) then you can easily debug production issues with it. If you meant debugging type stuff yes there's debugging already, including from the Idea plugin.
Could one eventually build a TCP in Ballerina where the animated diagram is the program?
Re: Ballerina – concurrent, typed language with textual and graphical syntax
#30is this webpage really slow and hard to scroll for anyone else?
Yes, it's awful for me on Chrome 58. While I do need to update my browser, I tried on a couple of others and it seems much smoother on Firefox:
Chrome 58 OSX: extremely janky, but I do have lots of tabs open.
Chrome 61 Canary OSX: a little janky, but mostly ok. It's the only open tab.
Firefox 54 OSX: smooth scrolling. It's the only open tab.