Prismatic's "Graph" at Strange Loop • Hacker News Board

Re: Prismatic's "Graph" at Strange Loop

#41

Post by tensor » Fri, Oct 12, 2012, 2:55 AM UTC

salimmadjd wrote: post #16

I love reading prismatic's blog. You have some really smart people there. However, it seems like you're trying to solve everything from a purist view and I think your product is suffering as a result. I have made the same suggestion consistently that would make me use it more without any reply. Basically, I've stopped using the product as the UX does not match the reason I would want to use the product.

I'm curious what your complaints are, do you mind sharing? Especially because you invoke "purist view", which is rather confusing talking about UX, a very subjetive area.

For myself, I feel that the main feed could use a lot more whitespace and have less information about each story. For example, I wouldn't mind being able to toggle off the social quotes completely and perhaps even the images (images are nice for some sources, but not others).

Re: Prismatic's "Graph" at Strange Loop

#42

Post by w01fe » Fri, Oct 12, 2012, 3:22 AM UTC

grayrest wrote: post #34

w01fe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome -- thanks for posting

Thanks for writing it up. I've thought about dataflow programming before but building the dependency graph up was always annoying and the idea of sticking everything in a map and building the dep chains by introspecting the argument names hadn't occurred to me. With the ease of use solved this is handy enough that I'll probably turn it into a real promise-based utility.

Awesome, I'm excited to see what you come up with. If you do end up making something, please email me a link (I wrote you earlier) since I'm sure there's lots to be improved in our implementation.

Re: Prismatic's "Graph" at Strange Loop

#43

Post by xtrahotsauce » Fri, Oct 12, 2012, 7:59 AM UTC

blaines wrote: post #38

blaines wrote: post #36

Is it just me or is the prismatic blog text being cut off on the side? https://twitter.com/blaines/status/256545302926995456/photo/...

Appears this may be a retina mbp thing...

happens to me on an iPad as well

Re: Prismatic's "Graph" at Strange Loop

#44

Post by gajomi » Fri, Oct 12, 2012, 3:15 PM UTC

w01fe wrote: post #15

aleyan wrote: post #3

Nice. Assuming that the computation of each node is memoized, can we 'dirty' a single node, so that during the next computation only the needed parts of the graph are recomputed? This would make multiple computation of models where only a few parameters are changing much more efficient. Also, has this at all been inspired by SecDB's powerful graph oriented features?

We haven't had the need for that application yet, but it's certainly possible -- that's why declarative specifications are great :) I haven't heard of SecDB, but I'll definitely check it out -- thanks!

This is definitely a use case I am interested in. I have been playing around with computer algebra in Clojure for awhile where it is critical to keep track of these dependencies (I have a hacky implementation which relies on metadata so that the resulting data structure is out of site). But of course, when you actually want to evaluate something, this is when you need to get sophisticated. There can be multiple paths in the graph to arrive at the same node and you have to decide. With memoization at nodes being an important consideration. Anyway, I would be very happy to see an open source version of this!

P.S. As I understand it all the graphs are dags. In my line of work (which involves doing stuff at the interface of probability and statistics) there are quite a few recursive functions that are difficult to unroll explicitly, or are otherwise undesirable to unroll for the purposes of readability. Can we expect to see circular dependencies at some point. Well, I know, the halting problem and all, but still...

Re: Prismatic's "Graph" at Strange Loop

#45

Post by rafaelferreira » Fri, Oct 12, 2012, 7:39 PM UTC

Pretty cool project, like a functional reinterpretation of dependency injection frameworks. The basic idea behind dependency injection is to make all dependencies for each unit explicit and externally supplied.

DI frameworks then build upon the pattern offering a declarative DSL to declare dependencies and wiring. They also offer a selection of alternatives to build dependent objects (e.g. build a fresh one when needed or supply a global instance for every dependee) and a smidgen of generic functionality via impersonation (e.g. monitoring, logging, timing, transaction acquisition/release).

Interesting that untyped functional programming and macros allow for a lighter expression of the same basic idea.

Also interesting that maps of functions are a fundamental part of the solution. There are definitions of object-orientation that amount to basically records-of-lambdas. I've long thought that there is a lot to gain by using this basic abstraction as it naturally provides seams for testing/observability/auditing/etc.

Re: Prismatic's "Graph" at Strange Loop

#46

Post by tel » Sat, Oct 13, 2012, 1:53 AM UTC

moomin wrote: post #40

mattdeboard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need to "bolt on" lazy evaluation since (future) and (delay) are parts of the core language (not to mention lazy seqs)

Well, future, delay and lazy sequences are bolt ons to an eagerly evaluated language. I'm not convinced the laziness is Haskell is worth it, tbh, but its true that you really wouldn't need this project.

Usually these kinds of demos are the same as the ones touting the virtues of Haskell's laziness. The visualization is really nice, though, along with the possible paralleization. I think the Par monad is a more interesting comparison, honestly.

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/monad-par/0.3/do...

Re: Prismatic's "Graph" at Strange Loop

#47

Post by jwr » Mon, Oct 15, 2012, 10:17 AM UTC

w01fe wrote: post #13

a-priori wrote: post #2

Very interesting, needs more examples though. It seems like this fits a similar purpose to Nathan Marz' Storm framework. Could you do a bit of a compare/contrast thing between Graph and Storm?

Thanks! There are some more complex examples in the slides, I just didn't want to make the blog post any longer. The main similarity between this and Nathan Marz's Storm framework is that they both rely on a declarative expression of the structure of the computation graph. However, beyond that there are many key differences. Storm is a graph computation framework, which compiles your specification into a distributed…

But, from what I understand, if I structure my software using Graph, it should be much easier to run it using Storm, even without automated tooling. That way Graph becomes a stepping stone: structure your software, and if you need Storm's parallelism/scalibility, define a topology using the same functions.