Hey folks, there's something I saw a while ago and...
# thinking-togetherh
hamish todd
07/22/2020, 12:06 PMHey folks, there's something I saw a while ago and I'm looking for. It was:
-A recently made hybrid IDE and language
-Whose opening webpage had a demo of them making pong. It involved being able to click on the paddle to open a menu
-There were quite a lot of wires around but they had put a bunch of thought into its presentation
h
hamish todd
07/22/2020, 3:51 PMTHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK YYYYYYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUU
😉 1
hamish todd
07/22/2020, 3:53 PMFuck these people's SEO. A friend of mine correctly guessed that it had "deep" in the name, but 45 minutes of googling of that kind got me bugger all
i
Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 4:12 PM
(Newcomer note: we don't slag people here, even if they're outside the community, since they might join in the future.)
I had a DM conversation with the creator of this demo and got some backstory you might be interested in. (Paraphrasing, so apologies to the creator if I get this wrong. Also, I believe they wish to remain slightly anonymous.) They originally built this demo in C++, inspired by Bret Victor. They made a video of it, posted it online. (That's why you couldn't find this via search — their "website" was only ever just a demo video on an otherwise empty, and now offline, landing page). As they continued to work on it, they realized that they didn't have a good way to scale up their approach to handle more complex cases, not without a tremendous amount of work they weren't prepared to do. Also, they saw what the folks at Luna (now Enso) were doing, and felt that that was a much better approach — and that they actually had the funding necessary to make a go of building a novel visual programming environment.
Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 4:16 PM
Frankly, I disagree with the assessment. I think the DeepUI prototype was taking a far more interesting and potentially fruitful approach than Luna. To me, Luna is (was) a way of making an ML family language much nicer to work with, but it is not truly visual programming (and neither is Max/MSP, etc). Whereas, DeepUI actually is visual programming in the truest sense, and that, for my money, is a very exciting space just waiting to be explored. There absolutely are ways to scale this sort of a model up handle arbitrary complexity — but, I agree, it will take a tremendous amount of work. (Though, certainly, not as much work as has gone into gcc, JVM, or v8)
➕ 1
c
Chris Knott
07/22/2020, 4:25 PMWas there ever a usable demo of this or just the video? Even in the pong demo there must be a load of logic not represented on screen
i
Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 4:47 PM
Just the video. I believe they continued hacking on the project in such a way that it no longer resembles the demo, and no longer runs, and is not in a publishable state.
h
hamish todd
07/22/2020, 11:00 PMThank you for that Ivan, that is interesting!
hamish todd
07/22/2020, 11:06 PMI agree that DeepUI is more interesting than Luna, but I'm not surprised they couldn't figure out how to make it scale.
So far apart from Bret's work I am most impressed by Chalktalk, which I'm sure you know about. It has problems scaling too.
One of the reasons I was asking about DeepUI (and why I joined this slack) is that I am going to make a presentation on, surprise surprise, my own visual programming IDE ideas 😅 I hope to make it a bit more scalable... although I realize the odds are stacked against it
i
Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 11:19 PM
Cool! I hope you'll share some of your work in #CCL5VVBAN, or in #C0120A3L30R if you want to make short (2 minute) weekly updates as you go.
Ivan Reese
07/22/2020, 11:21 PM
I'm aware of Chalktalk, but I haven't actually seen it. Do you have a good link?
j
Joe Nash
07/22/2020, 11:23 PMAhh I’m so glad you found the project @hamish todd! (I was the guy who replied to you from the enso twitter, spent a good while being like “wait did I miss someone making pong in Luna?!? and hunting around the interwebs!)
h
hamish todd
07/22/2020, 11:51 PMHeh thanks Joe. To be clear I think Luna is more scalable than DeepUI too 😄
hamish todd
07/23/2020, 12:01 AMChalktalk: so the deal is that Ken Perlin has given the same presentation using chalktalk about 6 different times on youtube. He is a deep thinker on the philosophy of all this, almost as much as Bret and Alan, and his thinking around chalktalk is worth listening to; this 2017 presentation is as good as any and this (timestamped) link shows you where it was in 2011 showing a nice AR approach
2 Views