I'm working on a graph-based Excel that moves away from a Cartesian namespace to a web-based canvas that lets you place a "cell" on the 'easel' by clicking anywhere and typing whatever you want. The parser will try to infer your intent (e.g. "that look like a date," or "John looks like a person," or "this vector of vectors looks like a table.") to help with sorting, filtering and visual distinction.
Spolsky wrote, "The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures."
Each cell acts like a transverter - a reducing function that supports undo and produces a mutated graph. All values are lazy sequences that materialize on-demand. If you type `=` or `(` it will try to evaluate your expression and offer to spit out lazy values into a new, neighbouring cell.
There are several large ongoing efforts on visual programming interfaces, but most of them try to make the user "program visually". I'm just trying to give you an incremental interface that lets you manipulate connections and query any value with Datalog, including the graph itself.
Nice! Sounds interesting as an ex-excel wizard for billing in large companies. Watch out for spaghetti nodes though. Ue4's blueprint editor turns nodes into octopus monsters with many arms that seek to strangle the programmer. The ability to bring disparate nodes in to a top-down, left-right predictable order is quite useful. The same way we read.
Spolsky wrote, "The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures."
Each cell acts like a transverter - a reducing function that supports undo and produces a mutated graph. All values are lazy sequences that materialize on-demand. If you type `=` or `(` it will try to evaluate your expression and offer to spit out lazy values into a new, neighbouring cell.
It's called Hoist for now and I wrote down some of my rationale for why I think it's valuable: https://github.com/theronic/hoist/blob/master/README.md
There are several large ongoing efforts on visual programming interfaces, but most of them try to make the user "program visually". I'm just trying to give you an incremental interface that lets you manipulate connections and query any value with Datalog, including the graph itself.