Luna – A WYSIWYG language for data processing

by tillulen • 7 years ago

296 86 7 years ago

ebg13• 7 years ago

I find the writing style on the site and in the docs to be extremely verbose. My kingdom for some up-front concrete data examples without having to wade through an essay.

PaulHoule3• 7 years ago

I don't think English is their native language. They should probably hire a tech writer.

Also, tutorials and examples are the Achilles' heels of GUIs. I remember back in the 1990s when you'd go to a bookstore and find 1200 page tomes full of screenshots that would tell you how to do everything in Word 95.

Something that is "just run this script" in a CLI is a 20-page checklist with screenshots with a GUI.

jordache2• 7 years ago

Looks interesting. Then I saw the data collection disclaimer during the install wizard. Deleted it in a instant.

You lose many potential clients just for that alone

kreetx• 7 years ago

What did it say?

rygxqpbsngav• 7 years ago

Is this what you are referring to? https://luna-lang.org/alpha-data.html

jordache2• 7 years ago

That page's disclaimer makes it look a bit more benign. THe install wizard's disclaimer did not show the bullet list.

skohan• 7 years ago

Pretty nice looking website. Smoother performance than most pages with "fancy scrolling" I often see.

Cilvic• 7 years ago

Only nit bit from me is that the animations are playing a bit too fast to follow along what's happening. Maybe that's intentional to "tease"? I would want to slow them down a bit.

Would be great to just hit "Enter sandbox" or "demo" or see a tutorial without the download.

lloeki• 7 years ago

Very cool. Makes me think of Bret Victor's work.

http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction

This is the kind of visual programming I'd be ready to buy into.

holtalanm• 7 years ago

this has been posted on HN at least 4 other times in the past three years.

still interesting, but i don't do much data science, so will probably never get a chance to use this.

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

Maybe you're interested in movies then?

As far as I remember the history correctly, Luna is a spin-off project from Flowbox development - https://flowbox.io/.

jgtrosh• 7 years ago

Luna is the world’s first programming language featuring two equivalent syntax representations, visual and textual.

Is this true? This is not my strong domain but I'm sure there are such programming languages.

SiempreViernes• 7 years ago

I guess this hinges on exactly what meaning is hidden in the word "equivalent", I could imagine that a very tight coupling of text and visual forms would be novel.

hjek5• 7 years ago

Yes, exactly. Depending on the definition of "equivalent", Puredata[0] may or may not qualify as well.

[0] https://puredata.info/

lioeters• 7 years ago

All programming languages can be reduced to an abstract syntax tree as the canonical ("equivalent") representation of a program, with visual and textual views. I'm sure there are prior examples - HyperCard, Max/MSP, ..

Edit: Gotta say, I love x3 the design/aesthetic/presentation of the Luna language.

TheAsprngHacker• 7 years ago

The Scratch programming language has an unofficial text syntax called Tosh: https://tosh.blob.codes/

The in-development GP language can alternate between blocks and text: https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/GP_(programming_language)

DonaldFisk5• 7 years ago

Scratch is a textual language with a visual editor and representation. Having two easily readable, equivalent, representations for dataflow programs is a lot more of a challenge.

johnday• 7 years ago

This is not true. GameMaker does this at the very least. You can swap between the visual and direct GML language whenever you want.

I seem to remember a visual javascript thing which had the same feature.

teamonkey2• 7 years ago

Unreal Engine's Blueprint language has an equivalent plaintext form. You can copy nodes from the visual editor, paste them to a text editor and vice-versa. I think it's more a form of serialisation, but code is data is code...

For example: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/h6gkslt6/

tyleo4• 7 years ago

Luna looks great. I've been doing work in this area myself and hope to launch my own visual programming environment next month or so: https://imgur.com/a/zLS1g0t

Unlike Luna though, my own environment does not have a dual-syntax representation. It can import functions from TypeScript though and export them as nodes. I also plan to target build tools rather than data processing.

I'm excited to see so much progress being made in this area. Two other examples are NoFlo (https://noflojs.org/) and Flolab (http://flowlab.io/).

KloudTrader• 7 years ago

Yours looks like Xod.io, one of the visual languages available for Arduino.

(We also do visual programming, though for algo trading.)

tyleo4• 7 years ago

I haven’t seen that one yet. Looks neat. Algo trading is a really interesting application. I’m planning on starting out with a visual markup language editor (.json, .xml, etc) and continue with more advanced build tools if that is successful. I think it would be great to be able to visualize a dependency graph.

What has your experience with Xod been like? Have any advice?

nikofeyn3• 7 years ago

everybody always seems to ignore the most advanced and general purpose visual programming language/environment, that being labview. i suppose it is probably because it sits behind an expensive license.

NotPhysicsPhd2• 7 years ago

I would add that not only the license is quite expensive, but it has a confusing "syntax" that most often than not results in unmaintanable software.

DonaldFisk5• 7 years ago

While doing research for my own dataflow language, I've had a look at LabVIEW. There's plenty of online documentation available, but I didn't like some of its design choices, e.g. how iteration and conditional statements are done is overly complex. There are natural ways of doing these in dataflow which LabVIEW doesn't use. Also, type inference is actually simpler to implement in visual dataflow than it is in text-based languages, yet LabVIEW lacks it (unlike Luna, and the dataflow language I'm still developing). Finally, every dataflow program is a directed graph, which is the most general data structure there is, so it really ought to be a fundamental data type - like Lisp's S-expressions are.

However, LabVIEW is one of the oldest visual dataflow languages (AFAIK only Prograph is older), and it's certainly worth learning about if you're interested in visual and dataflow programming.

JPKab• 7 years ago

Alteryx is another one, and it's super popular in the business world.

LabVIEW is limited to the research and academic realms AFAIK.

breck3• 7 years ago

Cool! I've worked in this space for years as well. Another good recent article about visual programming is: https://divan.dev/posts/visual_programming_go/

tyleo4• 7 years ago

Out of curiosity, what sort of work have you been doing in this space?

negativegate• 7 years ago

Cool, I started working on something similar a while back but I didn't get past handling generics. Like if you have a node<T> with two T inputs and a T[] output, then when you attach a number to an input, the other input's type becomes number too and the output becomes number[]. That could need to propagate to connected nodes, too. Also when you disconnect a node, you would want to determine whether T must still be a number.

Is that something you're handling in your project? Do you have any pointers?

tyleo4• 7 years ago

Devev is written in TypeScript and the TypeScript compiler is open source so I’m able to leverage it directly. That, in addition to the GitHub project ts-simple-type takes care of most of my difficulties.

However, I don’t support generics as first class citizens in the node editor yet and probably won’t for V1. I can detect that an input/output is a generic but I convert it to any before use.

If your project is based on an existing language I’d recommend taking a look at injesting compiler tools if they are open source.

deforciant• 7 years ago

I have been successfully using Node-RED for quite some time now (https://nodered.org/) :) really like it so far, great tool to quickly add simple and complex health checks to your systems and automate various tasks that no necessarily deserve to have their own services. Kinda like your own FaaS platform (mine runs on an Intel NUC).

Luna looks great and I actually think I initially saw it and then I was looking for it but couldn't find it, ending up with Node-RED. I might give it a try, however I didn't see any mentions of how it integrates with Git :/

d21d3q• 7 years ago

I might give it a try, however I didn't see any mentions of how it integrates with Git :/

Like this: [https://nodered.org/docs/user-guide/projects/]

itodd• 7 years ago

This looks interesting and I tried to play with it but the colors are so dark and everything is hard to see.

stevenpetryk• 7 years ago

I sound like a broken record but accessibility makes sites better for everyone, not just disabled people!

rofrol• 7 years ago

dark background is bad for eyes

PaulHoule3• 7 years ago

There are quite a few "boxes and lines" tools out there such as Alteryx, Actian, LabView, KNIME, etc.

Many people swear by them.

I like that Luna has a text syntax.

I also like that Luna supports building graph functional blocks that can be nested inside other graphs. That's a missing link in other tools of this type that limits the scale of what you can do with them.

I'd like to see a tool like this which has something like a JSON document going over the lines, but that might be asking too much. If the objects going over the lines are basically relational rows you can do columnar execution at very high speed. The Actian people have looked at alternatives to what they do, but I think they haven't extended the data model past relational because they couldn't get it fast enough to compete with their own product.

(e.g. a classic "disruptive technology")

Retra• 7 years ago

I don't know... I look at this and I just see an alternative front-end for a spreadsheet program.

crimsonalucard3• 7 years ago

Spread sheet programs are functional languages. Luna looks to be a functional language, hence the similarity.

Spread sheet programs just have a bad rap of being used by non-programmers, and limited functionality outside of the spreadsheet universe. Ignoring the caveats mentioned, the principles of spreadsheet programming are programmatically sound. Spreadsheet programmers are functional programmers.

LudwigNagasena• 7 years ago

How is it different from other ETL tools?

daemonk• 7 years ago

Does it support any kind of HPC job launching feature?

badsavage• 7 years ago

Pretty cool

JaimeThompson• 7 years ago

How does Luna make money? I am worried about the possibility of features being moved behind a paid version after people are tied to the product.

maxyme• 7 years ago

They posted about this on HN before, basically they are VC funded and would like to make their money back by providing community support and paid features.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14613264

agentofuser• 7 years ago

Neat! Anyone with more understanding can point out differences with statebox[1]? Both seem to be:

- visual and textual

- purely functional

- dataflow-like

I get the feeling that statebox might not be turing complete (guaranteed termination) and have a stronger focus on formal verification. Also, it doesn't seem to have a visual editor yet.

[1] https://statebox.org/what-is/

wires• 7 years ago

hi,

I know Statebox pretty well :)

Luna not super well, but I did beta test their first release (and some later versions), cool stuff.

Anyway, the two are (feature wise) very similar, as you noted:

- both have textual/visual representations, - are typed FP languages, - access to FFI/effects, - diagram nesting

But Statebox is _not_ data-flow, it's more about "control flow" or "multi-party protocol execution". (You could do data-flow with Statebox, but at the moment that's prohibitively inefficient.)

Where Statebox takes a different direction (I think) is in basing the language on established concepts from category theory and focussing on 'generality/compositionality' ; specifically, our diagrams are not "graphs", but (morphisms in) categories.

This difference is very very subtle, in fact, seems totally irrelevant if you want to visual programming (see the nice codex, clearly it works using graphs!)

but it becomes more important when you want to diagram's to be "universal". at least in principle, the Statebox language should naturally and compositionally translate to any kind of hardware ; we want you to be able to program smart contracts, p2p-systems, JS frontends, digital circuits, heck, maybe even slime molds, all from the same diagram.

Luna certainly has more features at this stage.

(also, our editor is under heavy development and not yet published, we are aiming to release some things around the statebox summit in september)

Maybe it's fair to say: Luna is like a better NodeRED, Statebox is conceptually closer to something like homotopy.io / globular.science ?

Hope this clears things up a bit

spiralganglion6• 7 years ago

Plug — for anyone researching or otherwise interested in visual languages like Luna, I keep a collection of projects, papers, talks, references, and other related media here on Github: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex

As for Luna, it seems like they've gone quiet for the past while, though I believe they're still hard at work on the project. Hopefully they can improve the stability and performance of the program, because to date I've found it almost unusable.

For a similarly interesting project (albeit not visual in the same way), I recommend people also take a look a isomorƒ: https://isomorf.io

breck3• 7 years ago

Wow, thanks for putting that together. I think this is the best list of visual programming tools I've seen to date. Very easy to scan with the images in there.

wiz21c• 7 years ago

yeah, the list is very interesting to read. The screenshots are a plus !

spiralganglion6• 7 years ago

Thanks! Gradually adding more screenshots whenever I get the time. Glad to know the format works well for you.

mottosso• 7 years ago

I love these. Here's one more: http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarm...

spiralganglion6• 7 years ago

You'll find that link, and a few other great ones like it, on the "Reflections" page of my codex: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/m...

My favourite is the "Gallery of Programmer Interfaces" by Jonathan Edwards: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE...

I can also heartily recommend following Edwards on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathoda

thomastraum• 7 years ago

you should add Houdini, it's the biggest of them all.

spiralganglion6• 7 years ago

Great suggestion. I love Houdini — such a neat twist on the traditional "one gigantic workspace" 3D software format.

rayalez• 7 years ago

Houdini is the best!

Also Substance Designer and Nuke.

teamonkey2• 7 years ago

Have you seen https://machinations.io/ ?

spiralganglion6• 7 years ago

I have not, and that looks amazing! Thanks for the recommendation.

sheinsheish• 7 years ago

Hi and thanks ! Why not include https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synt... Reaktor NI since you have max/msp and pure data on the list.

spiralganglion6• 7 years ago

Yep, I should add that to “Inspirations”

Max and Pd are included in “Implementations” because you can use them to do general purpose programming — they just excel at audio thanks to a great standard library.

ComodoHacker• 7 years ago

WYSIWYG language

Please, let's refrain from such awkward terminology. "Graphic language", "visual language" are fine. "WYSIWYG data processing" is okay. But let's not forget any graphic syntax is an abstraction.

DonaldFisk5• 7 years ago

An abstraction of what? If the paradigm is dataflow - i.e. capable of running directly on (hypothetical) dataflow hardware - a graphical representation is more natural than a textual one.

pierrec• 7 years ago

Yeah, I'm not sure how the term applies here. If you're using Luna to make a program that generates output, "what you see" (the node graph) is definitely not "what you get" (the output). Maybe you can have an inline preview, but it's not what you're editing.

WYSIWYG describes domain-specific tools that let you manipulate the final product directly (or a draft of it), without having to look at any kind of source, be it a node graph or source code.

crimsonalucard3• 7 years ago

I didn't take a look deeply but that graph looks like function composition. Looks like luna is a functional programming language.

pankajdoharey• 7 years ago

I've seen it so many times on HN, i wonder if anyone uses it in production?

DonaldFisk5• 7 years ago

It would have been a good idea to contact the developers before posting a link to their project, to involve them in the discussion, and allow them to clear up any misunderstandings about their work.

wut42• 7 years ago

The discord widget that eats part of the screen on mobile is very annoying - besides the fact that another OSS project is using proprietary communications systems.

didibus• 7 years ago

I think the question I've always had with these visual languages is if they target user friendliness and ease of use in the hope that non-programmers can use them? Or do they actually think it'll be more productive for professional programmers than text based languages?

I think for the latter, it'll be really really difficult to achieve. I can maybe see the former, but I also worry for the former, these are too general, and domain specific graphical tools will always dominate.

Luna – A WYSIWYG language for data processing

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