[Visi] What will be (likely) Visi's sweetspot?

[Eric Brigham]

Hi guys,
I'm new here, but am very excited about this project. I've never
designed a programming language, and the most advanced language I have
dabbled with is Scala. So most of my questions/comments will probably
be coming from a business or end-user side. The business (ie: excel
replacement potential) of this language project is what gets me the
most excited. It's baffling how often spreadsheets are used for
mission-critical tasks in the real world still!

So I think that brings me to my question. Do you envision Visi mostly
as a platform for making apps/models that are much more robust and
usable than their excel predecessors? Even if this is the only thing
Visi does, I would still be ecstatic! However, I'm wondering if Visi
will be taken further? For example, will it be possible to, say,
build something like twitter, or a online scheduling application, or
heck, in the extreme case, something like a decentralized p2p
application, in Visi?

I know that there is a lot to be said for "picking the right tool for
the project," and I want to be able to pick Visi for 90%+ of typical
projects. Is that reasonable or am I misunderstanding the purpose of
the Visi Platform?

--Eric

[David Pollak]

Eric,

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 10:09 PM, Eric Brigham <ebri...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi guys,
I'm new here, but am very excited about this project.  I've never
designed a programming language, and the most advanced language I have
dabbled with is Scala.  So most of my questions/comments will probably
be coming from a business or end-user side.  The business (ie: excel
replacement potential) of this language project is what gets me the
most excited.  It's baffling how often spreadsheets are used for
mission-critical tasks in the real world still!

You mean: http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/My%20Publications/Whatknow.htm

 

So I think that brings me to my question.  Do you envision Visi mostly
as a platform for making apps/models that are much more robust and
usable than their excel predecessors?

I think Visi.Pro will be a modeling tool for the current millenium, but it will also offer a much better way to layer a UI on top of the model (a whole lot more Interface Builder and a whole lot less row/column).

 

Even if this is the only thing
Visi does, I would still be ecstatic!  However, I'm wondering if Visi
will be taken further?  For example, will it be possible to, say,
build something like twitter, or a online scheduling application, or
heck, in the extreme case, something like a decentralized p2p
application, in Visi?

I think that's all possible, but rather than building a language that can compile itself, I'm looking at building a language that allows for the modeling of common business apps.  One of the demos for Visi.Pro will be building 37 Signals' Campfire in less than 30 minutes.

 

I know that there is a lot to be said for "picking the right tool for
the project," and I want to be able to pick Visi for 90%+ of typical
projects.  Is that reasonable or am I misunderstanding the purpose of
the Visi Platform?

That's my long term goal, but I want to stay focused on solving the "departmental level" issues... the ones that are solved today by Excel, Access, FileMaker, etc.

But the cool thing about the Visi language (as compared to the Visi.Pro product/platform) is that we can collectively take it where we want.  If you've got some "write Twitter in Visi and run it on the server" project and you can enhance the language to make your project a reality, please contribute.

Thanks,

David

 

--Eric

--

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