Comment by smj-edison
1 month ago
> You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.
Amen to that. Even dynamic land has some major issues with GC pauses and performance issues.
I do try to put my money where my mouth is, so I've been contributing a lot to folk computer[1], but yeah, there's still a ton of open questions, and it's not as easy as he sometimes makes it look.
Folk computer looks interesting. I wonder what it is. You'll never find that out by looking at that link.
That's fair. It's still pre-alpha, and under heavy development, but it's working on taking the best of dynamicland[1] and trying to take it a lot further.
In terms of technical details, we just landed support for multithreaded task scheduling in the reactive database, so you can do something like When /someone/ wishes $::thisNode uses display /display/ with /...displayOpts/ { and have your rendering loop block the thread. Folk will automatically spin up a new thread when it detects that a thread is blocking, in order to keep processing the queue. Making everything multithreaded has made synchronizing rendering frames a lot tricker, but recently Omar (one of the head devs) made statements atomic, so there is atomic querying for statements that need it.
In terms of philosophy, Folk is much more focused on integration, and comes from the Unix philosophy of everything as text (which I still find amusingly ironic when the focus is also a new medium). The main scripting language is Tcl, which is sort of a child of Lisp and Bash. We intermix html, regex, js, C, and even some Haskell to get stuff done. Whatever happens to be the most effective ends up being what we use.
I'm glad that you mention that the main page is unhelpful, because I hadn't considered that. Do you have any suggestions on what would explain the project better?
[1] https://dynamicland.org/