Why does category theory magically transform node diagrams into something usable from something not? Unreal blueprints/Reactor schematics/whatever are quite fine in their current form, even if their usage falls apart in advanced constructions. Is statebox going to magically make huge node-and-graph-designed programs reasonable?
Your writeup didn't convince me that "category theory" adds any significant value, and neither does it help inform as to what category theory actually is. How does statebox improve upon existing node-based programming implementations?
CS formality and big words misses the point of visual programming entirely, in that it is to simplify the process of software creation to make it more approachable to non-programmers. Unless your UX is absolutely top-notch you are going to lose these novice users as they struggle to deal with the constraints without a good reason or UX to do so.
Also- The memetastic design of statebox's main page is a pretty big turnoff :(
> Why does category theory magically transform node diagrams into something usable from something not? Unreal blueprints/Reactor schematics/whatever are quite fine in their current form, even if their usage falls apart in advanced constructions. Is statebox going to magically make huge node-and-graph-designed programs reasonable?
Your writeup didn't convince me that "category theory" adds any significant value, and neither does it help inform as to what category theory actually is. How does statebox improve upon existing node-based programming implementations?
nothing magical, just good engineering and UX design and solid theoretical underpinnings.
cat. th. does add value: there are many ways to build diagrams and build syntaxes for diagrams, but they are not all equivalently powerful or general. but it turns out that there are diagrams that _are_ suitable, and this is what we use.
It will improve upon existing diagram tools in that it gives a formal theory of how they work, so you can really build huuge diagrams and still be sure everything works.
I didn't write the blog post, but I could try to write one about the value of category theory, because it is often misunderstood. It is however very abstract and takes the mind a while to see the value off, which is not so easy to convey.
> CS formality and big words misses the point of visual programming entirely, in that it is to simplify the process of software creation to make it more approachable to non-programmers. Unless your UX is absolutely top-notch you are going to lose these novice users as they struggle to deal with the constraints without a good reason to UX to do so.
oh, yeah this is something often misunderstood, we are not trying to target novice developers (yet). we need to develop a lot of stuff and CS formality is right now still the simplest way to understand the system. I mean, we are not trying to be arrogant or puffy or something, but for instance the way we realise our compilation is with "functorial semantics". we have a functor between categories that does the trick. We could call it something else, but it doesn't help (at this stage).
anyway, if we do our job well then all the category theory would be under the hood and you just get a nice UX for coding with diagrams.
> Also- The memetastic design of statebox's main page is a pretty big turnoff :(
opinions differ :) I thought it was quite funny 2 years ago and many people thought so as well and then it got turned into this homepage.
at the moment we don't really have time to spend time on the site, but it will def. be changed in the future
Your writeup didn't convince me that "category theory" adds any significant value, and neither does it help inform as to what category theory actually is. How does statebox improve upon existing node-based programming implementations?
CS formality and big words misses the point of visual programming entirely, in that it is to simplify the process of software creation to make it more approachable to non-programmers. Unless your UX is absolutely top-notch you are going to lose these novice users as they struggle to deal with the constraints without a good reason or UX to do so.
Also- The memetastic design of statebox's main page is a pretty big turnoff :(