enso

t it is unclear. > Why would anyone non-technical use this tool over RapidMiner which feels much more user friendly with Drag-Drop widgets (does Enso have a "widget" library pane or only the autocompletions?). As I wrote above, making Enso more user friendly, with icons for every action etc. is our main effort right now. The goal to improve user experience with every weekly release. Enso however, is much more extensible than ie. RapidMiner. If there is a need to add a custom blocks and share them with others in your company - we are working on making it instant and possible without any engagement from technical team. > Conversely why would anyone technical use Enso over jupyter notebooks and ipywidgets or bokeh? If it is a single person or a technical team, who doesn't have to explain the process to the business users or non-technical domain experts they might be happy with notebooks. Having visual representation is helpful for bigger workflows, that have to be easy to understand by non-technical user. However, interactivity while working with Enso is adding a value here as well. You can observe changes in your visualisations when data have changed, without refreshing, in real time. This is making testing ideas faster and more effective.

's planned after fixing stability issues), but it's already on our short-term plan to be added! > I noticed a bug where if I hit the spacebar multiple times quickly to toggle the result view the entire canvas goes blank, then comes back if I hit the spacebar again I cannot reproduce it. Would you be so nice and create an issue report with a short screen recording and your machine spec here, please? https://github.com/enso-org/enso/issues > I found it a little confusing that the args of a node are displayed as a var name even when the exact input is known. For example I had the constant `6` as an input to a function `n.up_to` which rendered as `number1.up_to` when I expected to see `6.up_to`. This is one of the things we are currently working on! This will be much improved in one of the following minor releases (we will do a release every week now). > I didn't find it intuitive that you cant (I think) edit existing nodes. Do you have to create new ones from scratch, or copy/paste somehow? You can do it. We use double-clicking to ENTER the collapsed nodes. To edit the node use `CMD + Left Mouse Button` on the expression (or `ctrl` if you are not Windows or Linux). The full list of shortcuts is here: https://github.com/enso-org/ide/blob/develop/docs/product/sh... We want to add an icon for that as well, so it will be easily discoverable in the future. I'm really happy that most of these points cover with our dev plans! It means that in a few weeks you'll have a much better experience <3

, because this is something system / machine specific. There is unfortunately no other way for us to improve and progress from alpha to beta, so we will be very thankful for help here! <3

nce then, we've drastically improved the product. It is still rough around the edges, but works much better now. We have also made a few tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4oMK7cL1ElfNR_OhS-YQAw), and docs (https://enso.org/docs/syntax). We've added many new libraries, so you can do many more things with it now. Oh, and we changed the name to Enso and got accepted to YC! :) The problem we address is that data analysts still waste up to half of their time on repetitive manual work that can be automated [6]. To give one example, a company we're working with hires business users who use Excel to define data quality rules. These get manually translated to SQL, then manually translated to Python. This is not only error prone, it’s so slow that it takes them 90 days to introduce a single new rule. There’s 60 days’ worth of overhead in this process—it’s insane! Years ago I (Wojciech) led the in-house development of visual effects (VFX) tools at a motion picture studio. We made tools like cloud renderers and smoke simulation engines. The artists using these tools did not have any programming background, yet they were designing complex algorithms for forces between particles, light subsurface scattering, things like that. Earlier generations of these tools had hundreds of config options, buttons, etc., for masses of different use cases, but this approach got way too complex and people eventually realized that it falls short when you need to do anything that the vendor did not think of. Nowadays they use node-based software (like the Houdini FX) which lets users draw algorithms as a sequence of data processing steps (these steps are often referred to as “nodes”). Later, when I was working in other industries and encountered the same rats’ nests of complex GUIs for solving data processing problems, I realized that the data analytics/science space was in need of the same breakthrough that we had already gone through in the VFX space. Most visual programming languages / workflow-builders do not scale well because they don't let users express abstractions. Try to build a complex pipeline and you'll end with an unreadable spaghetti of connections—it's like coding a web app in assembler. Enso is different because we allow you to build abstractions to manage the complexity. As a result, you never have more than 10-20 nodes on the stage in Enso (nodes are hierarchical). You can create custom data types, custom components (functions), catch errors, etc. All this works because under the hood, Enso is a real programming language. However, naive implementations of such systems are super slow. Each component may be built of hundreds, sometimes thousands of lower-level ones. The real trick is making these hierarchical components run fast. For that you need a dedicated compiler and a runtime system, and this is a hard technical space. Our system involves a dedicated JIT compiler based on GraalVM. For details, see https://enso.org/language#compiler. In case this is interesting for you, here is our podcast about how the compiler works under the hood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BibjcUjdkO4. Enso is interactive, meaning that we recompute the relevant parts of graphs as parameters change, which shortens feedback loops dramatically. Like a lot of people on HN, we were inspired by Bret Victor's classic talk on instant feedback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc. We’ve also put a lot of effort into extensibility. You can add Java, JavaScript, R, and Python (soon also Ruby, Scala, Kotlin, Rust, and C) directly into Enso nodes without the need to write any wrappers and with a close-to-zero performance overhead. Enso is open source. Our compiler code is at https://github.com/enso-org/enso and our GUI code at https://github.com/enso-org/ide. Our business model is based on selling domain specific libraries, on-premise installations with enhanced user permission management, and coming soon, a hosted solution called Enso Cloud, which will be our only non-open-source codebase. Since this is Hacker News, I should add that all our alpha releases collect anonymous usage statistics which we use to improve Enso and prepare it for a stable release. Full details about that are always in our release notes (https://github.com/enso-org/ide/releases/latest). Dear HN friends, we are super excited to show Enso to you. Please, share with us your thoughts, experiences, ideas and feedback. It is insanely important to us, as our dream is to make Enso the most useful data processing platform in your toolbox! Also, in case you’d like to build your projects on top of Enso, we would love to help you do it – describe what you have in mind here, and we will reach out to you: https://airtable.com/shrsnx2mJuRn0MxIS :) === Links === [1] Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11144828 - Feb 2016 (100 comments) [2] Luna – Visual and textual functional programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14612680 - June 2017 (310 comments) [3] Luna 1.0 Beta is out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16163769 - Jan 2018 (167 comments) [4] Luna Studio – Visual and textual functional programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17704989 - Aug 2018 (64 comments) [5] Luna – A WYSIWYG language for data processing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20182090 - June 2019 (86 comments) [6] https://www.alteryx.com/e-book/idc-study-the-state-of-self-s...

open-source project over a week ago and we got a lot of questions regarding what is the best way to learn its textual syntax. To address these questions, we have created a dedicated page for it! Check it out here: https://enso.org/docs/syntax If you want to learn more about Enso, check the following links! - our website: https://enso.org - our GitHub (Enso is Open Source and free to use): https://github.com/enso-org/enso If you have any questions, I'd love to answer them! <3