Show HN: Pt, an experiment on visual forms

http://williamngan.github.io/pt/

by metaphorical • 11 years ago

22 6 11 years ago

williamngan.github.io

This is a side project I've been working on for a couple years (when not playing video games :P). I hope you'll give it a try, and I would appreciate your feedbacks. Thanks!

victorantos• 11 years ago

it looks cool! can you make it like an embeddable widget?

fiatjaf• 11 years ago

I don't understand it, but it is awesome.

veli_joza• 11 years ago

Nice looking demos, very easy on eyes. The "triangle.oppositeSide" is already half way to a puzzle game.

hacker_9• 11 years ago

I enjoyed the demos - I'm not exactly sure why, but I guess it felt like I was making a lot happen when really I was just moving the mouse around.

I think that, when you step back from programming in text, and think of it as 'creating ideas' you realise that we've barely scratched the surface. Often when I solve problems in my head it's a mix of visual/verbal thoughts with past memories thrown in too. Your demos show that visualization is a powerful tool, but how do you make it useful?

Being able to see the world and visualise is like the base code for being a human, but computers are all math and text. Bringing visualization to programming is surely the next step. Already the cogs are turning to try and bring realtime REPLs to IDEs (such as light table, and visual studio code online) in order to see data as you code. I imagine from here the next step would to be able to visualise that data beyond text, and be able to edit the visualization and see the code change as a result.

metaphorical2• 11 years ago

You described the problem very well. When I thought of an idea, it's indeed visual/verbal with memories thrown in. Then when I sit down to code, I have to worry about putting curly braces in the correct places before anything else.

Though I'm not sure if a "visual" IDE will solve this. To me, it's more about a language that can express thoughts with clarity and directness, and also about a kind of literacy in code as poets would have with words and meters.

Sometimes I kept thinking about those stone axes and clay tablets and scribbles on bones, and how, in a couple thousand years, they evolved into lolcats. Given this explosion of technology, what sort of new expressions in code will we see in 10-20 years? It's fascinating to think about.

Show HN: Pt, an experiment on visual forms

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