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Luna 1.0 Beta is out

luna-lang.org

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Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#151

Post by cakoose »

wdanilo wrote: post #149
cakoose wrote: post #50

"many recent innovations in programming language design, such as higher-order functions, non-strict semantics, algebraic data types, object oriented programming and sophisticated type inference engine" These lies are unnecessary.

@cakoose, would you be so nice and elaborate more why do you think we are lying? It is very sad to read such comments, seriously. We were doing our best to bring Luna to our community, so why are you talking that we were lying about anything now?

None of those are recent innovations in programming language design. Higher-order functions, in particular, have been part of mainstream programming for so long.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#152

Post by CyberDildonics »

raytracer wrote: post #75
kustosz wrote: post #2

Hi, I'm one of Luna founders, I'll be happy to answer any questions! :)

This looks great. Congratulations on releasing the beta. * Is it possible to work with incoming data in real time? * Is it possible to use MIDI and audio as data sources? * If so, can the applications also output MIDI and audio in real time?

You want to check out Touch designer. It can do a lot, you including midi, and is made to work in real time.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#153

Post by dman »

wdanilo wrote: post #113
arnioxux wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equivalent text and graph representation is the killer feature. I previously looked at stuff like https://flowhub.io/ide/ which is a dataflow language spec and editor. Specifically the js version https://noflojs.org/example/ for compiling graphs into js for some canvas image pipeline work. Each component has an underlying text representation that you can edit like you guys. But that representation isn't code. It's ju…

arnioxux, thanks for sharing your thoughts here! I completely agree, that double representation is the killing feature of Luna. Personally, I do not believe we can progress in the domain of software design by removing the textual form. Because of that, we have designed Luna to be textual-visual, so tightly integrated, it is just one thing. For example, you can write any expression above our nodes, let it be `2+2` or…

What problem domains do you think are the best targets for this way of programming?

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#154

Post by bane »

wdanilo wrote: post #118
bane wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with a few visual dataflow language tools like this in the past, and there's definitely an important place for this kind tools in many environments -- this is beautiful work! I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but just want to throw in some support. One of the problems I've seen with these tools in the past is that they tend to live in very niche places and not get much public exposure. I'm very…

@bane, thank you for your comment. It is very important to us to work with people who already have experience with visual languages, so please, stay in touch with us and use our forum / chat to tell us about your ideas! We would love to help you create things with Luna! Your sentence about visual languages that tend to live in a very niche places is a VERY important topic to me. In fact I think I've got a very crisp…

At the moment I'm too swamped with other things to give this the dedicated look it deserves, but I'm going to try and get a couple of my staff to give it a look-see. We do lots of data processing tasks in different domains and often need to figure out and then establish long processing pipelines quickly.

One of the problems I think with these kinds of languages is that the dev environment and the run-time environment end up being the same. Which means that users of the pipeline also need to have the entire dev environment installed which rarely makes sense. (I don't know if that's true here, but it's something to think about). This compounds with the vendors of these tools are often stuck back in old business models and want thousands (or tens of thousands in some cases) of dollars for each license, even if all a user is doing is running a model somebody else built. It would be like requiring everybody who wants to run software on Windows needs to buy and install the entire Microsoft Visual Software development suites.

I really agree with #3, often these tools come with some kind of palette of modules that you wire together and making new modules is a huge pain or impossible. It looks like Luna is taking a very different approach. I think figuring out how to integrate the dataflow models into some kind of repository of library of models and provide some kind of change control is going to be really important as well as my experience is that these models usually end up being treated like Microsoft Excel documents and just emailed around and dying on people's hard drives.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#155

Post by seanmcdirmid »

wdanilo wrote: post #116
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bret Victor has written about these kinds of languages before, mainly in his "Drawing Dynamic Visualizations" notes ( http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend... , talking about what he just presented): > Is this "visual programming"? No. The term "visual programming" has had a well-established definition for several decades, and this tool is not that. > A "visual programming language" provides gr…

@seanmcdirmid We are not yet there, but we develop Luna to target EXACTLY these use cases - program modification AND very direct data manipulation. We see Luna as an unified platform for building rich DSL's. An example of such rich DSL is what Bret Victor demonstrated in his talk. You can read more about rich DSL's and what Luna is meant to be in our blog post here: https://medium.com/@luna_language/luna-the-visual-w…

Also, have you checked out Conal Elliott's Tangible Functionla Programming (Eros) work? It is a bit dated (2007) but explores being more direct in a Haskell-like language.

http://conal.net/papers/Eros/

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#156

Post by Andrenid »

slowhands wrote: post #138
darkkindness wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also be aware that it's a beta. It's not necessarily an evil thing to want to get feedback on your software from those who are interested.

Then why make opting-out of telemetry consent so obtuse?

It's a beta. You're helping them test it, so them collecting usage/statistics is completely fair. If you don't want to take part in the beta testing, don't install the beta and wait for the full release (which the creator said elsewhere in the thread won't require email or data collection).

In saying that, I do think a sentence above the email field saying "By taking part in this beta, you're helping us collect data to improve the product for final release, which will not require your email address or do data collection unless opting in" or some such.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#157

Post by dang »

cakoose wrote: post #50

"many recent innovations in programming language design, such as higher-order functions, non-strict semantics, algebraic data types, object oriented programming and sophisticated type inference engine" These lies are unnecessary.

> These lies are unnecessary.

There's no need to be like that regardless of how wrong someone is, and it's against the site guidelines, so please don't.

Instead of swiping at someone, why not explain how they're wrong? Then we all learn something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#158

Post by dang »

shall20 wrote: post #144
cakoose wrote: post #50

"many recent innovations in programming language design, such as higher-order functions, non-strict semantics, algebraic data types, object oriented programming and sophisticated type inference engine" These lies are unnecessary.

I don't know why this comment is down-voted. It might be harsh, but quite frankly the quote is just wrong on a technical level. All of theses "features" were present in the 80s and 90s...

Being right doesn't excuse being uncivil. On the contrary, it's worse when you're right because then you're discrediting the truth.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#159

Post by mmjaa »

wdanilo wrote: post #136
Fnoord wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of the existence of the Lua programming language, and the word "lua" meaning "moon" in Portuguese?

Actually it is not intentional. We do not have any connection to Lua. The name "Luna" was used from the beginning of the project, people started recognizing us with it and we simply love this name so it stayed with us. If such confusion would be often, we will change the name, however, we've got few comments that this name could be confusing but in fact nobody ever confused it. We are still open to change it and are…

I was initially excited about this, because I'm a huge Lua user and fan, but then when I realised it was something other than the object of my love, was immensely disappointed it had nothing to do with Lua.

So I'd be one of those who'd suggest a re-branding, because the Levenstein distance is not big enough and there is too much potential for brand pollution on both fronts. Lua got to the moon first - you should shoot for another distant body, imho.

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