PANE: Programming with visible data
So much great stuff here!  Rough around the edges, but it&#x27;s a research prototype.  Thoughts:<p>- This reminds me of Subtext ... oh, they cited that as an influence!  I love it when people learn the state of the art and take previous work and build on it.  Surprisingly uncommon.<p>- Paraphrased: static types are an indirect way to look at a function&#x27;s behavior, data is a direct way.  I never thought of it that way!<p>- Is that a single quote used as an icon to indicate that it&#x27;s a string?  Neat!  (I use icons in Strukt to indicate data types, but I went the other way, and no-icon means string, with a &quot;#&quot; icon indicating a number.)<p>- This is the second time this week I&#x27;ve seen a system where you could connect nodes by either dragging an edge, or typing a name.  Is that the best of both worlds?  Are we converging?<p>- I love that names are optional, and not restricted to C-style identifiers.  This is a perfect example of something you can&#x27;t easily do in plain text: without an out-of-band place to put identifiers, you need to deal with escaping, or character ranges, or ...<p>That said, while I love the concept, I disagree with them on some basic points.  One that wasn&#x27;t explicitly mentioned:<p>- It&#x27;s still a highly-specialized mouse-driven environment, and I&#x27;m still not convinced there&#x27;s any future in those.  It makes for a nifty demo, but plain text really took off because everybody has a text editor which can edit any text, and learning to edit one format helps you learn how to edit other formats in the same editor.  (Can you tell I&#x27;m an Emacs junkie?)  What I want is a generic keyboard-driven GUI graph editor.  It should be able to be hooked up to live visualizations, via other processes, too.  It just needs to be able to edit any kinds of graphs.  I don&#x27;t want my investment in learning this editor to be limited to one specialized type of (mouse-y) programming.<p>Somebody needs to make a great graph-based editor so all these people experimenting in this space don&#x27;t need to keep re-inventing the UI wheel.  (Note to self: me?)