CXcxr·Mar 9, 2024
CDG Labs. But this is not it: <https://github.com/cdglabs/sketchpad14>
In Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]cdglabs
sketchpad14
JavaScript2016–2024
cdglabs / sketchpad14
sketchpad14
Getting inspiration from Sutherland's 1961 Sketchpad and Overveld's retake on its relaxation technique 30 year after, we are working on a general constraint reactive programming model to be able to do modern web application development in the same declarative way.
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2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
96GitHub stars
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What it is
Getting inspiration from Sutherland's 1961 Sketchpad and Overveld's retake on its relaxation technique 30 year after, we are working on a general constraint reactive programming model to be able to do modern web application development in the same declarative way.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year2 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-09-24 21:33:16 UTC to 2024-03-09 16:27:28 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesThat's definitely a really interesting piece of prior art! It looks like the patent expired last month. I'm sure there are a lot of other interesting approaches in the space, so I'd personally (and I'm assuming other people in the HN crowd) really appreciate similar things in the comments!
A lot of the ideas for constraint-based graphics date back even earlier (1963!) to Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (YCR's HARC revisited some of the under-explored ideas of Sketchpad in 2014 https://github.com/cdglabs/sketchpad14).
Also by HARC, there's Apparatus (http://aprt.us/) which, like g9, uses numerical gradient descent to handle constraints (we actually both use insanely awesome uncmin implementation from NumericJS).
And of course there's the work by Ravi Chugh, et al. on prodirect manipulation with Sketch-N-Sketch (https://ravichugh.github.io/sket
Read the rest
ch-n-sketch/), which handles constraints symbolically with careful provenance tracking.
From CMU's HCII, Stephen Oney's ConstraintJS (http://cjs.from.so/) also explores the idea of using constraints for building interactive web applications— though, like Sketch-N-Sketch, it's primarily a symbolic approach.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of Carbide, and contributed a little bit to G9.