I've always been weirded out by these "programming by connecting boxes" environments. In my experience, the only benefit they bring is removing the need to understand the syntax, which is the simplest part of programming, at the cost of making it much more complicated to find out the boxes, figure out what can connect where, looking up documentation, etc.

Interestingly, I don't get this feeling with Snap! or Scratch. Sure, they're not designed for me, but they're intuitive, and they just work.

Not sure where the disconnect lies. Quite possibly in my brain.

Maybe one advantage is there aren’t things like syntax errors to deal with, or naming things. The structure makes things purely functional and allows for multiple outputs from a block as well as optional inputs. Seems to me that it removes a lot of the incidental complexity in writing shaders (syntax, linear structure, specifying inputs, imperative shader language, etc)

Speaking of Apple platforms, yeah, this was my big problem with Interface Builder. I couldn’t get anywhere with serious Apple platforms development until SwiftUI came along.

> In my experience, the only benefit they bring is removing the need to understand the syntax

It also offers better discovery—an additional major barrier if you aren't used to fighting documentation.

Should have a better name. There is Fabric, a library in Python, microsoft's SaaS offering

Also a popular Minecraft modding framework https://fabricmc.net/

That's a rather obscure conflict, when you think that the two have no domain overlap

Microsoft also called their new replacement for Synapse Fabric. So Microsoft has at least two projects named Fabric.

Is there a good resource on naming things? Or a catalogue of brilliant names?

A great resource for naming things is to use google once you think you have a good name. It really doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

The problem is that coming up with good names is difficult. What I need is a quick way to get to " think you have a good name"

Everything has collisions unless it's an invented word. And even then, you might find prior art.

Fabric is a extremely overused name.

Link to rendered samples: https://fabric-project.github.io/showcase.html

Note the samples link in github goes to the .fabric samples, not rendered ones.

Is it realtime?

Is there anything similar that is not limited to Apple?

Looks like too many boxes needed for simple things.