@yoshiki's https://www.notion.so/Dango-b46c07f3dc224f968c768885abe70e70 deserves more eyes than it would get when buried deep in a comment thread. Original context for the curious: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C0120A3L30R/p1595894934187200?thread_ts=1595738168.147900&cid=C0120A3L30R (I'd love for more people to hoist great comments by others to the top-level, as a sort of counter-force to always responding within-thread.)

I'm super interested in the idea of programmable documents and think this concept is great! I find this horizontal / vertical tree layout very interesting - it's a bit like microsoft publisher and css flexbox had a baby. However, I'm curious what benefits having the layout structured as a tree has over placing elements on the page wherever one chooses? Is it an unnecessary constraint?

1. i think i’ve saved the link to dango four different times on at least two platforms (here and twitter for sure). it’s so cool 2. my main thought on the atomic data stuff is that the common feature of the successful horizontal apps is actually a UX that makes using the data structures in flexible ways discoverable to a user. usually starting with one thing (lists in the cases of excel and trello) that gets extended, usually by enabling filtering and transformation of those simple data structures

@Ryan King At the time I couldn't imagine a good way to add absolute/relative positioning with the structure I designed, and didn't think it was that important compared to the structured layout. Now I think that both are important. Figma's autolayout feature shows how the two can coexist and play different roles depending on context.

@yoshiki that makes sense. Thanks for the insight!

Finally got around to look at this... nice! Reminds me a bit of Leo, which has been around for many years and has a relatively small but enthusiastic user community. Leo is less sophisticated in being based on a simpler data structure (just nested lists with text at the leaves), but it also permits including code that can do queries and manipulations.