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Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

natto.dev

11–20 of 101 posts

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#11
Very cool. A few years back I was trying to build something similar, my intention was to create a canvas for visually programming cryptocurrency bots. I thought that it would be cool to be able to follow the data transformation visually, so I focused on rate limiting on the code execution and expressive animations on changes to the data so that a human can visually follow the data flow and transformations(when I switch to bullet mode, a delay is introduced between each data transformation and a visual feedback indicates what changed).

My prototype was not as neat and at some point I got convinced that it's actually easer to reason over algorithms when written in code and this visual style of programming works well as long as you deal with algorithms on very high level with no implementation detail considerations. When implementation details need to be part of the work, i.e. you need to think about how to fetch and transform a JSON file and match it with a CSV data it's actually easier to learn how to code and build your logic procedurally. Maybe people are not good at visually following large number of active objects and I think it's not only me because I'm sure that people get exponentially more confused with the addition of a new button or number to the scene.

When you don't have a simple enforced structure like "instructions execute from top to bottom" the visual freedom becomes yet another thing that you need to think. I find that the most visual processing tools that are helpful are spreadsheets, they have a good and simple structure to follow for storing and representing data and powerful features enabling calculations on that data. Google Docs also has data fetching functionality(not sure about Excel), making it a very interesting data processing software.

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#12
post #5

Please don’t prevent people from leaving your site using browser navigation. It’s impossible to get back to hackernews by swiping back on iOS.

You should complain to you browser vendor, not the website owner. Swiping back works just fine on Android.

Not on FF on my device...

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#13
Very neat, and seconding impression of reminding of observable, but much more freeform. Here's a dumb little demo of appending some divs to a dom element, with random heights.

https://natto.dev/@dazld/7168773775bd401481366b7d62d14e8c

It's quite fun to think about the restrictions of this - getting an animation loop going, for example.

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#14
This site's negativity/nit picking is sometimes incredible.

This is an incredibly cool product that is by their own words "very alpha" and people jump to "OMG i know what hijacking is so I'll point it out" for attention. It's kind of a tired trope. This is obviously not an intentional hacking of users but rather a quite harmless bug in the implementation of an undo/permalinking feature.

Great job to the devs and I hope I can find a utility for this product in the future, it's kind of a javascriptable excel concept, really cool.

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#15
post #5

Please don’t prevent people from leaving your site using browser navigation. It’s impossible to get back to hackernews by swiping back on iOS.

Page didn’t load right on mobile and then I couldn’t escape back to HN.

Maybe you can blame Apple and Safari, and maybe I’m unfair, but if that’s the first impression I get from something related to programming, well...

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#16
post #5

Please don’t prevent people from leaving your site using browser navigation. It’s impossible to get back to hackernews by swiping back on iOS.

You should complain to you browser vendor, not the website owner. Swiping back works just fine on Android.

Firefox 78.9.0esr on Debian Buster has the same problem

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#17
post #14

This site's negativity/nit picking is sometimes incredible. This is an incredibly cool product that is by their own words "very alpha" and people jump to "OMG i know what hijacking is so I'll point it out" for attention. It's kind of a tired trope. This is obviously not an intentional hacking of users but rather a quite harmless bug in the implementation of an undo/permalinking feature. Great job to the devs and I ho…

Warning people that they won't be able to get back to this site is not an overreaction.

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#18
post #14

This site's negativity/nit picking is sometimes incredible. This is an incredibly cool product that is by their own words "very alpha" and people jump to "OMG i know what hijacking is so I'll point it out" for attention. It's kind of a tired trope. This is obviously not an intentional hacking of users but rather a quite harmless bug in the implementation of an undo/permalinking feature. Great job to the devs and I ho…

Warning people that they won't be able to get back to this site is not an overreaction.

> they won't be able to get back to this site

I hate it when sites break the back button, but that's really not the same thing

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#19
post #5

Please don’t prevent people from leaving your site using browser navigation. It’s impossible to get back to hackernews by swiping back on iOS.

You should complain to you browser vendor, not the website owner. Swiping back works just fine on Android.

Maybe OP‘s implementation of overriding the default browser behavior on Android just sucks ;)

Re: Natto.dev – A Canvas for JavaScript

#20
post #7
post #5

Please don’t prevent people from leaving your site using browser navigation. It’s impossible to get back to hackernews by swiping back on iOS.

I don't believe that was intentional, he hijacks the back button so he can use it as an undo internally. It's just an unfortunate design choice which should have been avoided.

„he hijacks the back button so he can“ - sounds pretty much intentional. No one would argue against an alert asking you if you want to leave without saving you work or sth similar, though.
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