This sounds very close to what I spent a year or two searching in vain for. The closest thing I could find was node-red (http://nodered.org/), but that still fell far short. In a weird way, the problem is that every attempt at implementing a functional/dataflow programming environment, at least from what I've seen, invariably tries to do way too much.
The ones I've seen all seem to try to give you a whole bunch of pre-canned function/node for everything you might want to do. This is clearly not a feasible approach. As I see it, they really only need to implement three to four things to have the ideal solution. The first two are: function-nodes that take input which they operate on to produce output, and directed edges that make it possible to connect outputs to inputs.
And following from this the second two logically fall out: a low friction way of amassing (and sharing) a library of function nodes, and some clever UI trickery that makes it easy to black-box a 'canvas' of interconnected function-nodes so that it just becomes a single function-node on a 'higher-level' canvas (i.e. effortless encapsulation, composition and abstraction without loss of low-level control). Systems within systems within systems.
I honestly don't know if any of this makes sense or sounds like a good idea to anyone else. Admittedly I tend to think that our entire reality, from the cosmological to the microscopic, is just one big system composed entirely of other interconnected, lower-order systems. Everything is a system.
It largely makes sense, and the are many developers trying to find this "holy grail" model of efficient computation that will be the basis of future software, overcoming the limits of the Von Neumann machine (which has been the base default model for the last >60 years).
There's a problem though that every developer will understand those explanations in slightly different ways, making it difficult to communicate the reason why such model is needed. What I miss in projects like ibgib out your comment above is grounding it in concrete examples of use cases, practical situations that are particularly interesting to the developer and which explain how their specific approach is better than traditional programming in that situation.
I didn't "set out" to find a "holy grail" and certainly not to overcome the Von Neumann architecture...ibGib in its current incarnation is just the current manifestation of my approach to address some of those concrete examples, mixed with my background like many of understanding and unifying things such as physics, maths, etc.
So, as I mentioned in the other reply (I even used the term "concrete"), I am currently just on a really cool note taking app. It's pretty much done(-ish) since it's totally usable, and I'm on now to a different concrete goal.
The other "practical situation" arose from ibGib's previous Android incarnation, which was basically two-fold: 1) Too expensive creating domain-targeted data structures (was using EF, but any relational-database would have the same issues). 2) Caching and cache invalidation.
IbGib is addressing both of these issues: 1) I now have an engine to create domain business objects without all the muck of having to "get it right" the first time. This is because it keeps track of the entire history of the process of creating the (class) data structure as well as the actual data implementing those structures. 2) As a corollary to this aspect, I now can update the client whenever any change occurs within an entire dependency graph, because both the data and the code-as-data are "indexed" by the ib^gib.
So caching in ibGib's current web app is basically about passing around "pointers", from what I understand this is very similar to how Docker handles layering hashes when building and rebuilding docker images.
Also, I can't avoid saying a meta use case, which is this thread that we're having right now. In a forum, you have a linear view and that's pretty much it. With ibGib, you can have truly branching threads, with a linear time view being just one projection of the content of those branches. So, say for example with Slack, they have a "thread" feature that they've just implemented. But it's only one thread. With ibGib, it's n-threads. The linear view is one of my issues that I'm going to be tackling next (along with notifications). But it's slow going, cuz it's just me ;-)
> So, as I mentioned in the other reply (I even used the term "concrete"), I am currently just on a really cool note taking app. It's pretty much done(-ish) since it's totally usable, and I'm on now to a different concrete goal.
Yeah sorry I didn't mean to imply that you don't have concrete goals (although I couldn't find them explicitly stated in your website), only that this kind of "rethinking computing/storage/interaction" projects are often hard to approach from the outside.
> IbGib is addressing both of these issues: 1) I now have an engine to create domain business objects without all the muck of having to "get it right" the first time. This is because it keeps track of the entire history of the process of creating the (class) data structure as well as the actual data implementing those structures.
That's cool! I've been looking for a platform that allowed incremental persistent storage, to build my own note-taking-meets-programming tool. How easy is it to detach the engine from the user interface in ibgib? I'd like to create something less "bubbly" for myself, but I could learn about how you use your simple data model to build domain objects. I've also been following the Eve language and I like their computation model, but so far there's no much there in terms of persistence.
> I think it's really exciting :-O, since it actually ties together many many things fundamentally: logic, physics, mathematics, AI, religion...
Just curious, how does a data model touch religion? :-D
> Yeah sorry I didn't mean to imply that you don't have concrete goals (although I couldn't find them explicitly stated in your website), only that this kind of "rethinking computing/storage/interaction" projects are often hard to approach from the outside.
Ah, infer and imply - perfect for ibGib! I say this because I didn't make that inferrence about concrete goals. It was more of like an event that prompts more attention to the concept of concreteness. As for the website, I hope it is quite obvious that is a WIP! ;-) I'm not a great front-end person, as I am super abstract and backend-ish, which segues nicely into...
> How easy is it to detach the engine from the user interface in ibgib?
The UI/web app is totally just a view into the engine (which is itself just the current expression of the "concept of ibGib"). It allows us to explore these abstract concepts more concretely. The plan is to have a CLI, an API, and possibly an isomorphic secondary implementation that allows for occasionally disconnected scenarios. The POC was attempted in isomorphic client/server javascript/typescript, but the complete parallel/concurrent aspect of it was too unwieldy. Elixir (Erlang and the BEAM(!)) turned out to be ridiculously well-suited for it, and their community and documentation is stellar.
> I'd like to create something less "bubbly" for myself, but I could learn about how you use your simple data model to build domain objects.
To me, this is incredibly easy to do. But I'm not sure if DeepUI's HN thread is quite the right venue for such a thing. I would love to work with you (and anyone else interested) in a GitHub issue. I am holding off on doing my own Show HN because I want a couple more specific features before doing such a thing. (I wasn't planning on speaking this much, but the comment was just too perfect).
> Just curious, how does a data model touch religion? :-D
ibGib is less a data model and more a projection of a certain type of logic...it's a "meta-logic", which ends up being the logic. This is similar to how any turing machine can emulate any other turing machine. The point is that I've been developing this logic for just about my whole life. I was that kid who slept through class, did no homework, got 800 SAT/36 ACT math scores, etc. But axiomatic systems, and the process of actually applying math, and proofs, rigor, etc. all didn't sit well with me. Neither did religion. Now it does. But that's a perfect opportunity for a GitHub issue or an ibGib. I don't have notifications implemented yet, but collaborating is actually implemented in that you can add comments/pics/links to anyone's existing ibGib that you have a link to.
You make so many salient points, I'm like a kid in a candy shop thinking of what to speak to. But in order to avoid writing a book, I'll just address your two main points.
First, the notion of the pre-canned functions for nodes: That's one of the really novel things about ibGib, is that there is an infinite number of possible functions that can be "performed on" each node. Any node combined with any other node, and we're all nodes, our programs are nodes, etc. Currently, programmers micro-manage this in a locally addressed memory space. What I've discovered recently is that my design is actually like a universally sized turing complete language. One of the earlier conscious design decisions I made was that ib^gib are cheap and data itself is expensive. This is essentially the same decision when dealing with pointers and memory...You "just" pass around pointers and the actual thing can be dereferenced to get the value (also it's immutable, also it maintains integrity, and more and more, I have to stop though or I'll keep going). So basically, my point is that dealing with the pre-canned function aspect is essentially just creating a new language...but why a new language and what is different?
Which brings me to my second point about the "low friction way of amassing (and sharing) a library of function nodes...": My design also ends up coinciding in many ways to GitHub's hashes (which I only realized after the fact when explaining this system to a brother of mine). But fundamentally ibGib is unique! Whereas GitHub (and everything else like it) thinks in terms of files and folders, dealing with diffing files, ibGib works at the conceptual/semantic level thinking of everything in terms of ibGib. You don't "create a new" ibGib or "new up" an ibGib. You fork an existing ibGib (any existing ibGib), and when you are forking a "blank", then you are actually forking the "Root". This conceptually has profound implications, but the end product is that you are forking, mut8ing, and rel8ing at an atomic level, the atomicity part being totally up to the ibGib that is combining state. For now, that's just my ibGib engine on my server, but really it's anything that takes in an ibGib and outputs an ibGib. So imagine you went to GitHub and not just forked a library, but forked a single function/class in that library. ibGib's data structure keeps a complete dependency graph (in the form of rel8ns to the ib^gib pointers) for every single ibGib. So if you have to make a change to some aspect, you fork it and make the change and now you're using the fork.
There are issues of complexity arising at this level of granularity though, which is partly why I'm working very slowly on concrete goals. The first one is the "Note Taking" app, which already is phenomenally useful (the videos I have don't really touch it). I'm dogfooding it every day, and though it obviously has limitations, it's extremely easy to use (as long as I don't get my micro t2 limit, now upgraded to a small on aws hah). Also to address the granularity though is how easily this system incorporates AI/machine learning, etc. This is because it's essentially a Big Data architecture on top of everything else. You create nodes that operate on projections of nodes that creates other nodes.
And I've already written so much, but I had to also mention that your "higher-level canvas" is a dependency graph projection of ibGib. Just today I've implemented tagging ibGib (which you can see on my github repo on my issue branch). Anyway, thanks for your response, and I'd love to talk more with you and anyone else about this because I think it's really exciting :-O, since it actually ties together many many things fundamentally: logic, physics, mathematics, AI, religion...the list goes on and on. Feel free to create an issue on my repo and we'll mark it as discussion, question, etc. After I've gotten a couple more features in place I plan on doing a Show HN.
Also I apologize to the DeepUI people as I'm using their thread to talk about ibGib (so I'm cutting it off here!). I have to mention that their video to me looks really awesome, and it reminds me of the MIT Scratch program (https://scratch.mit.edu/). But like others have mentioned on this thread, I also was totally confused as to how one would actually use it. But I love front end magic and polish, since that is what I severely lack!
The ones I've seen all seem to try to give you a whole bunch of pre-canned function/node for everything you might want to do. This is clearly not a feasible approach. As I see it, they really only need to implement three to four things to have the ideal solution. The first two are: function-nodes that take input which they operate on to produce output, and directed edges that make it possible to connect outputs to inputs.
And following from this the second two logically fall out: a low friction way of amassing (and sharing) a library of function nodes, and some clever UI trickery that makes it easy to black-box a 'canvas' of interconnected function-nodes so that it just becomes a single function-node on a 'higher-level' canvas (i.e. effortless encapsulation, composition and abstraction without loss of low-level control). Systems within systems within systems.
I honestly don't know if any of this makes sense or sounds like a good idea to anyone else. Admittedly I tend to think that our entire reality, from the cosmological to the microscopic, is just one big system composed entirely of other interconnected, lower-order systems. Everything is a system.