Re:Luna 1.0 Beta is out
by CapacitorSet on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @08:30PM
(#16164706)
The examples list failed to download, so I had the pleasure to try to program on my own (no, I'm not ironic, it's actually rather fun!) with the help of a bit of knowledge about functional programming.
The most important thing, i.e. the concept behind the language, is very cool. Though not a groundbreaking idea, the visual model is certainly an interesting outlook on understanding programming that goes beyond the trivial Scratch/flowchart software. The language itself seems to be very powerful, too, as is expected of functional languages. I like that functions can be defined on prototypes (eg. List.map) as well as its visual representation, though it took me a bit to figure it out ("why is it `list . map (+ 1)` and not `map list (+ 1)`? What's the `.` operator?", followed by "... oh, it's simpler than I thought").
The documentation is very basic - I wish the "Starting out" section included at least a hello world (eg. writing a function that returns `[1, 2, 3].map (+ 1)`, both in the GUI and in code). I can do that tomorrow (17/01 in the UTC afternoon), if needed!
The editor is okay, for a beta. It's quite "rough around the edges", with a few errors popping up here and there, but it's usable (though accidentally made it unusable, requiring a restart of the application, with a syntax error - but again, it's okay for a beta).
Anyway, it's a very cool project that I'll be keeping an eye on in the next months. Thank you for your work!
The most important thing, i.e. the concept behind the language, is very cool. Though not a groundbreaking idea, the visual model is certainly an interesting outlook on understanding programming that goes beyond the trivial Scratch/flowchart software. The language itself seems to be very powerful, too, as is expected of functional languages. I like that functions can be defined on prototypes (eg. List.map) as well as its visual representation, though it took me a bit to figure it out ("why is it `list . map (+ 1)` and not `map list (+ 1)`? What's the `.` operator?", followed by "... oh, it's simpler than I thought").
The documentation is very basic - I wish the "Starting out" section included at least a hello world (eg. writing a function that returns `[1, 2, 3].map (+ 1)`, both in the GUI and in code). I can do that tomorrow (17/01 in the UTC afternoon), if needed!
The editor is okay, for a beta. It's quite "rough around the edges", with a few errors popping up here and there, but it's usable (though accidentally made it unusable, requiring a restart of the application, with a syntax error - but again, it's okay for a beta).
Anyway, it's a very cool project that I'll be keeping an eye on in the next months. Thank you for your work!