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Update on Luna Enso: <https://medium.com/@enso_org...
# thinking-together
i
Update on Luna Enso: https://medium.com/@enso_org/your-enso-questions-answered-3e5fcac23801 I'm going to comment in the thread with some hot takes.
1. Business Model Hosted SaaS and on-prem — cool? Whether this is worth paying for depends on what you'll use Enso for, so I guess this means they're going to (perhaps subtly) focus Enso on server-y stuff rather than GP programming. (Edit much later: I misread this as hosting the output of Enso, rather than hosting the tool Enso itself. Hosting the tool makes a lot more sense.) Marketplace — this is my "if I can't think of anything better, copy Unity" idea for monetizing Hest. I hope I think of something better, because this feels like the sort of thing you should do after your tool becomes wildly popular. Otherwise, you end up with a bit of a ghost-town effect, and I've certainly been put off of participating in marketplaces because of that.
2. Variable Bindings = Lines In other words, there are no variables. There's no way to put some data down, run away, come back later, and pick up the data where you left it. The data has to flow immediately from producer to consumer. Perhaps they have some idea about a database or tuple space or some such in the background. But no mention of that yet.
i
Yeah, they're going to have to create some kind of value container for #2. You can't get very far without it and it's one of the worst parts of dataflow-centric systems. Part of the problem is that if all references need to be represented as lines, you get really nasty graphs the moment you have stateful containers like these.
Marketplace strategies pretty much always fail unless you're an incumbent
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The way I've been thinking about #1 is paid SaaS for the tools with optional hosting (+ some very compelling reasons to use that hosting), but you can take the resulting artifact and run it wherever.
i
Any time your business model is hosting, you're now just an AWS reseller, and that feels like a business that can be shut down without warning at a moment's notice. It worked for Heroku, but... there is already a graveyard here.
i
yeah, just hosting doesn't seem to work very well, but tool integrated hosting seems to workout fine. Webflow, bubble, retool, etc
i
Well, we'll see how many of those live past the end of their funding rounds. Webflow are at $70m, according to crunchbase, which is.. just mind-blowing to me. That's too much. Anyway... hot takes! 3. Seems interesting, but there's nothing here about what this looks like. Do nodes with an error as part of the type signature turn red? Can you do any debugging on the visual side?
Moreover, the language was designed such that, even if you create syntax errors, all expressions not affected by the error will still work. That is that, if one of the nodes in your graph has a syntax error, the other nodes still function correctly. This sounds like an obvious requirement for a visual language, but is currently not implemented in any textual language.
That's cool, but that's how JavaScript works. You can have a function that throws an error or fails to parse, and code that's outside the stack of the thrown error or the scope of the syntax error (but in the same JS context) will continue to run unaffected. They probably meant to say "not implemented in any textual language ill with the type disease" :P (Gotta be spicy or these aren't hot takes)
i
all of those companies are/were cashflow positive, fwiw
i
Ah, nice. I tried to verify that but couldn't find that info. Is this just something you knew offhand, or was there somewhere I could have looked?
i
know the founders for most of them, bubble was bootstrapped
so yeah, no secrets, just network 😞
I do wish there was more openness around business models and such, but I get why there usually isn't
interestingly enough, I've found indie game devs to be fairly open
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watch enough GDC talks and you can get a good sense of outcomes in that space
i
Yeah, going back at least as far as 2D Boy being totally open about the financials of World Of Goo.
Hot take 4.
will provide you with a widget for that type
Good! Hopefully there's a way to define new widgets that are of an equal class to the built-in ones.
We have created a sophisticated WebGL-based rendering engine capable of displaying millions of data points in an interactive fashion, in a browser. This will allow Enso 2.0 to display much more data than any solution we know.
I don't care about how many "data points" it can draw unless I'm building a scatterplot. Can I work with 3D models? Vector graphics? Texture maps? Animations? Can I build user interfaces?
i
I always struggle a bit with statements like:
This will allow Enso 2.0 to display much more data than any solution we know.
Those kinds of sentences pretty much only open you up to being wrong, while providing no real value.
they make people want to prove you wrong and derail the actual point.
I love the idea of "just render it all in GL", but boy is that a big pill to swallow. There are so many things we take for granted that you have to do, and do correctly, to make something even remotely useful in the real-world.
Things we think are trivial, like text rendering, can take you years to get right and even there you'll likely be picking the lesser of a few evils.
As an example: font rendering in both unity and unreal still sucks and they have functionally infinite resources.
When we were trying to ship Visual Studio 2010, there were several people solely dedicated to font rendering in WPF. Fonts were still blurry in some circumstances all the way up to the last couple of months before going live. As I recall, they'd been working on it for almost 5 years at that point. 😕
j
This was not as spicy as I expected when I opened the thread 😂
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Thanks for the takes @Ivan Reese, appreciate your thoughts and insight! Some of these I can get you more info on tomorrow (it’s late here) - the error stuff for example, the visual part of that is just straight up not implemented at the moment, but there’s a vision for what that should look like.
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i
Trying to strike the balance between being spicy, while still being constructive and not being mean :)
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j
Those kinds of sentences pretty much only open you up to being wrong, while providing no real value.
Hahaha yes I totally agree, something we have to work on - after a certain amount of time talking to investors and funding bodies, I think it’s hard to turn off. I’ll try to be a better hype-net 😂
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