Viskell: Visual programming meets Haskell

by bojo • 11 years ago

91 21 11 years ago

justinmk• 11 years ago

Has anyone been following Lamdu[1] and can comment on its status? I had expected to hear about it more often when it was announced 2 years ago...

http://www.lamdu.org/

i336_4• 11 years ago

TIL about this, this is very cool.

FWIW, "Latest commit ... 4 days ago," so it's not dead, which is nice. (And 4 days certainly gives lots of hope!)

windlep• 11 years ago

This is cool, but not really the problem I have, nor many I've talked to have when actually doing something 'real' in Haskell. (Granted we're a rare breed, actually trying to use Haskell for real-world use outside academia)

Show me how much memory a program will actually use. If it uses a lot, show me why it did, and where it did.

This is a solved problem for most mature languages, and the lack of tooling making it even remotely possible to figure this out in Haskell speaks volumes about how ready it is for "real world use".

i336_4• 11 years ago

It might be worth starting a discussion on this subject (here or elsewhere) to make more people aware of this problem.

(It was buried at the bottom of the comments here, not many people will see this)

melloclello• 11 years ago

Unison bears linking in this thread I think.

- http://unisonweb.org

- http://unisonweb.org/2015-05-07/about.html#post-start

VladimirGolovin6• 11 years ago

Cool! I'm also working on a visual functional language conceptually similar Haskell. I'm a founder of http://www.filterforge.com, and I want to develop a proper (i.e. Turing-complete, strongly typed with type inference, pure, lazily-evaluated) visual language for the next major rewrite of Filter Forge. Here's what I've been able to achieve so far:

A simple program (with equivalent Haskell and Racket code): http://i.imgur.com/dsNJYyx.png

List of strings, with element insertion GUI: http://i.imgur.com/Re64IJE.png

A more complex program, a function definition, and some sugar for infix math: http://i.imgur.com/KoxjoOM.png

Fold using a lambda, with equivalent Haskell code: http://i.imgur.com/avQNHXS.png

Complex signatures, polymorphism and typeclasses: http://i.imgur.com/cZ4KMzt.png

baibak• 11 years ago

So amazing! I was searching for such a thing, sadly it is not open source, but cool anyway.

camelite• 11 years ago

Link to code/binary for your visual programming language? It looks cool.

VladimirGolovin6• 11 years ago

It's really, really far from releasable code. The examples I posted are screenshots from my mockups (made in Excel).

What we have now as actual working code is a visual editor that allows to connect nodes together, a typechecker that prevent connections between different types (and invalidates / blackens existing connections if they somehow go wrong), and multi-input / variadic nodes such as lists and tuples.

It's not yet executable - you can't run the program in our visual environment yet, you can only construct / typecheck them. Also, we have a metric ton of unsolved problems: function definition and signatures, deconstruction of ADT values, definition of ADTs, preview of intermediate values for each node etc.)

Based on what I see right now, it will take at least a year before we have anything resembling a proper language. Also, I predict that the runtime performance will be awful.

fao_• 11 years ago

Hm, I actually find the code samples easier to grok, probably because I have to spend more time looking for the important bits in the flowchart display than the text display.

It is likely that it is because I spend more time parsing text, so I am more experienced at that than at parsing relevant information from flowcharts.

VladimirGolovin6• 11 years ago

In the example with take 3 (map (+7) (map negate [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8])) (http://i.imgur.com/dsNJYyx.png) I personally find the Haskell version the most readable of them all, then my visual version, and the Racket one the least readable.

i336_4• 11 years ago

Congratulations, you're now a member of the elite club of people who've (possibly accidentally? :P) made a subfeature so cool it needs to be a first-order thing in its own right.

I'm sure you've seen all the back-and-forth on here about open-source vs. closed-source in programming languages and taken note of current trends. :D

What I will say is that this looks very, very complete, and it would be a tiny shame to limit its awesomeness and usefulness just to Filter Forge.

An as-is officially-alpha build of whatever produced those shiny screenshots would certainly go down very well.

VladimirGolovin6• 11 years ago

Thank you, that's very encouraging!

The feature was not accidental. I always wanted to expand the possibilities of Filter Forge's nodal language, but until I met Haskell I didn't know how to do that. And now, after trying Haskell, it's simply impossible for me to think in terms of non-general, domain specific visual languages. The Haskell paradigm lends itself very well to a visual syntax, but there's a lot of problems to be solved, and that will be an excellent challenge for me in the coming years.

Despite looking complete, it's really, really far from that. There are serious conceptual problems that remain unresolved yet. We do have a visual tool for constructing and typechecking programs, but it’s not yet ready for any release, even an as-is alpha. Actually, the screenshots I posted are my Excel mockups: http://i.imgur.com/WYeLJJr.png

As for the open-source / closed source, I spent some time thinking about that, and discussed the idea with the team, but we’re not ready to make the decision yet.

On one hand, I'd be immensely pleased if our research on visual syntax for functional languages could be useful to the wide world. Functional programming really deserves wider adoption, and if our research can help that, I’d be very proud. Also, open-sourcing this may bring a lot of benefits to our commercial product, because it will allow us to access the global talent pool of functional programmers, who, collectively, have vastly more expertise than all our developers combined. I also think that many of these programmers are in academia, and would welcome a visual tool that could help them teach functional programming to their students.

On the other hand, we, as a company, have absolutely no experience in starting and maintaining open-source projects, and we have no idea how to do that properly, and what resources will it require from us. I’ll have to read up on that.

pjmlp• 11 years ago

For me visual programming adapts quite nicely to many FP concepts.

I can easily imagine some graphical tool similar to digital circuits design, where the basic build modulus are the lambda calculus basis.

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

It might not be clear, but here's an application to generate cities 'procedurally' using data flow operators

https://youtu.be/PDrALvAqsaI?t=254

The possibilities of this 'paradigm' are pretty unbouded and not tied to the usual programming data types.

VladimirGolovin6• 11 years ago

That's not just an application for procedural cities, that's Houdini (http://www.sidefx.com/), a relatively well-known 3D modeling, animation and rendering tool based on the node-based (a.k.a. functional) approach. I investigated them, and while I found the tool itself very powerful, its language is not a proper general-purpose functional language, and I don't think it's turing-complete (if you exclude their integrated Python scripting).

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I didn't imply it was a tool dedicated to this task, it's just a non-traditional example of dataflow (most of the time I see signal, maybe image composition, very regular data types).

You're right that the node-based part is not a proper GPFP. I just wanted to link a 'complex' application of the visual ~functional (if piping is function composition is correct) kind.

discohead• 11 years ago

Visual programming is always well-suited to audio synthesis, would be cool to see something like the Synthesizer library in there: https://wiki.haskell.org/Synthesizer

vmorgulis• 11 years ago

I can add Scheme Bricks:

http://www.pawfal.org/dave/index.cgi?Projects/Scheme%20Brick...

Viskell: Visual programming meets Haskell

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