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Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

nodes.io

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Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#81

Post by voceboy521 »

primitivesuave wrote: post #67
galfarragem wrote: post #57

Unpopular idea here (from a hobbyist programmer). I would "kill" for a text editor/IDE/REPL shaped as a spreadsheet where each cell is a block of code with 2 possible views (text or result) linkable to other cells. This "spreadsheet" would be programming language agnostic (each cell could use a different language) and I could organize/format my cells (location, colors, size, etc) as I wish.

This is actually a great idea. I had a conversation over beers with some people in a higher intellectual realm who were discussing the details of flow-based languages. It was the general consensus among them that in the future, flow-based programming will be the way everyone learns structural thinking, and we will look back on sequential instruction programming the same way we look back on punch cards today.

this seems obviously true. but why has it failed for like 40 years so far? many attempts have been made. for some reason all tools seem to fail, no matter how simple, they cause more problems than they're worth.

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#82

Post by dmnsgn »

lmeyerov wrote: post #19

Been following the creators for awhile and very much happy to see them democratizing their difficult skillset. Most designers -- think anyone using figma -- are effectively locked out of modern interactive and animated visuals due to not knowing hardcore shaders + effective js coding. To get a feel for how hard that is, look at the public timeline of Shirley Wu, another wonderful award-winning designer and experience…

Being coders ourselves we focused on a programmer-first approach indeed. The idea came naturally from a gap we identified in our day-to-day practice at Variable.io (data-art, installations, generative systems, ...). It enables some collaboration with designers (through exposing some parameters of the UI) but still focus on the coding experience to bring our projects to life.

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#83

Post by dmnsgn »

pharke wrote: post #71

After taking a quick look at existing visual scripting tools[0], it seems like the main feature differentiating this from the others is that the nodes are code modules instead of primitives. I think this is where visual programming can really shine, write modules in a text editor and then wire them up in a visual editor. This gives you the high level, conceptual view of the program flow without the excessively verbos…

We tried to stay close to what you would write without it, using npm packages and all that comes with it. TBH, spaghetti cables is kind of inherent to this kind of programming when scaling up but having code modules instead of just primitives is helpful indeed, letting you give the weight you want each node to have. We're also thinking about node groups as another level of abstraction to reduce visual cluttering.

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#84

Post by rgovostes »

cryo wrote: post #58
rgovostes wrote: post #38

Tangentially related, I've been thinking about how it is somewhat difficult to describe state machines in regular textual code, and it would be nice to have a drag-and-drop visual interface for mapping out the states and transitions, then tie regular code to the transition events. Is there anything like that out there? Or a good open source diagramming library that might lend itself to prototyping this?

QtCreator has a SCXML based visual editor for state charts https://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-scxml.html

Thank you! This looks very much like it would fit my needs, and I love that the output is an XML file I can integrate with other tools.

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#85

Post by dmnsgn »

domano wrote: post #5

I somehow fail to understand what this is, but am impressed by it nonetheless. Is this purely for animation designers with coding skills? I thought animation work is done in editors with even less code required usually, but for me as a developer this seems more approachable. I could not look at the advanced examples on my iPad though.

We're more geared towards programmers as you define what each node does in their code but you can choose to expose selected node parameters when exporting, for a designer/animator to potentially tweak.

Sorry about the advanced examples, some use WebGL and might have issues on iPad Safari that we'll need to check.

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#86

Post by coolgeek »

This seems interesting. It would be really cool to rapidly prototype and modify/refactor apps using this.

But it seems to me like the much harder part of this problem is 1) developing the nodes, and 2) ensuring that the nodes have the appropriate (sufficiently flexible/extensible) API for connections.

I guess what I'm saying is that this needs a "standard library" of nodes - at multiple layers of abstraction - if it is to gain traction. This is especially true, given that there are several other projects that are at least functionally equivalent.

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#87

Post by progfix »

galfarragem wrote: post #57

Unpopular idea here (from a hobbyist programmer). I would "kill" for a text editor/IDE/REPL shaped as a spreadsheet where each cell is a block of code with 2 possible views (text or result) linkable to other cells. This "spreadsheet" would be programming language agnostic (each cell could use a different language) and I could organize/format my cells (location, colors, size, etc) as I wish.

That's an idea that seems to be forming in the heads of a lot of people. I started working on something like that a couple of months ago. Blender is adding spreadsheet now. Excel is getting a more advanced language. ...

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#88

Post by [deleted] »

primitivesuave wrote: post #67
galfarragem wrote: post #57

Unpopular idea here (from a hobbyist programmer). I would "kill" for a text editor/IDE/REPL shaped as a spreadsheet where each cell is a block of code with 2 possible views (text or result) linkable to other cells. This "spreadsheet" would be programming language agnostic (each cell could use a different language) and I could organize/format my cells (location, colors, size, etc) as I wish.

This is actually a great idea. I had a conversation over beers with some people in a higher intellectual realm who were discussing the details of flow-based languages. It was the general consensus among them that in the future, flow-based programming will be the way everyone learns structural thinking, and we will look back on sequential instruction programming the same way we look back on punch cards today.

[deleted]

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#89

Post by uglycoyote »

I agree with some of the other posters who are saying that that it is difficult to figure out what this does or who it is for.

There's a huge headline saying "nodes for everyone". So, it's for my grandmother and my son and my uncle too?

Looking at the examples I see that there's a lot of cool looking geometry and special effects. So maybe "nodes is for everyone who wants to make cool visual things?"

Is it for artists who don't want to have do deal with code? Is it for coders who want their code to be more modular?

The best way I can understand this is maybe it's a competitor to something like Houdini, for people who are working at the intersection of art and code, it's like a procedural generation tool for art.

I thought it might be something which lets you build cool stuff without much code, but I was disappointed in the lack of modularity of some of the examples -- e.g. the "basic webGL" example in the playground. In that example almost everything interesting is going on in the one shader node.

Similarly with the boids example, the entire boid simulation is in one node with Javascript. It's not a reusable node.

I think the examples would be a lot more compelling if the nodes were each some trivial piece of functionality than anyone could look at and understand within 30 seconds, but they were put together into impressive creations. Like MIT Scratch for adults.

The problem with these examples is that there's too much complexity baked into a single node, which makes it difficult to understand those as reusable nodes. If I'm understanding it correctly, reusing nodes is the whole idea here.

Re: Nodes.io – A new way to create with code

#90

Post by taldridge »

Whenever I see things like this I tend to think back to this:

> Largely I think that text is already a highly-structured graphical notation, and that when people try to get "away" from it they're often doing so from a position of ignorance of how very long it took to get to where we are in textual notations, and how very many technical innovations are latent in textual notations. Visually unambiguous yet uniform symbol sets, combinatorial-positional word formation, linear spatio-temporal segregation, punctuation and structured page layout .. these are all technologies in writing that we had to laboriously invent, and they have purposes, advantages! Similarly in coding, we had to invent and adapt technologies from verbal and mathematical notations refined over millennia: lines and columns, indentation, block layout, juxtaposition and precedence, scope, evaluation order, comments, grammars, version control, diff and merge algorithms ... the pile of structuring technologies embedded in the textual representation of programs isn't free, and it isn't useless. So I'm just really cautious when people suggest throwing it all out for some hypothetical reinvention. You need those structures: so you've got an immediate problem of "what are you going to use instead", and a longer-term question of "what makes you think you're not going to wind up right back at the same place ten thousand years of refining graphemes-on-a-page wound up"?

(Taken from https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org)

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