hypermachine's comments

I am building a UI builder.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26532316

Cloud native VBA. See the earlier comments under my account for context.

We have automatic version control for our platform, give us a try when we launch.

Low code isn't inherently that bad as long as it offers a way to integrate with traditional code. Microsoft Excel is tremendously succesful in this area.

Fair enough and I agree, but I am looking for examples of UI builders with great UX and flexibility because I am currently building one.

> Programming languages are easy to learn

From our experience with VBA users, this is only true for non-technical (as in STEM background) users when it comes to languages with a close-to-English syntax together with tightly integrated IDE/editor. Lua, Python (and occasionally Ruby) are two other languages that are quite "easy" to learn. The curly braces languages? Not so much. Java is especially bad due to its poor error messages and opaque package management/build tools. However being easy to learn for the users doesn't mean the users are capable of writing good code. We found that code written by amateur users tend to be rather unstructured and incoherent. On the other hand some of the cleanest codebases I have read (from those without formal instruction or experience in software engineering) are by mathematicians and electrical engineers.

In terms of tooling Glitch.com and Repl.it are best in for zero-config workflows.

We often get questions about relevance when we mention we are building a VBA interpreter. Most people underestimate how much VBA code there are in production.

We have been working on getting VB6/VBA to run on the web and in cloud native environments.

https://hypermachine.org

On the other hand Go is doing very well with only minimal OOP features. I think for general purpose languages, a robust and big standard library is more important than any specific feature.

You can try us out when we launch, though for us it is more "assemble your own Notion tool like Lego" rather than an out-of-the-box Notion clone.

It will be released as open source over the summer. Currently only the interpreter is working. We are still building out the UI builder and editor. Take a look at our earlier comment regarding motivation/business model:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325064

This is quite true. We are building a VBA interpreter and the language is full of problematic practices. Go's much-maligned if err != nil pales in comparison to On Error Resume Next. Good static analysis and linting really helps here.

Hi Keith, I still remember when Autocode was called Stdlib. I liked the old name a lot better :)

For us at Hypermachine, we are tackling the problem by upgrading an existing low code platform - VB6/VBA. Our hypothesis is that pure no-code platforms are too limiting and inflexible for anything outside of the predefined connectors/widgets/use cases. There is a still a large gap between "call any arbitrary API and program" and "build a CRUD tool quickly". It is also a lot easier to convince users to use a platform that has been tried and tested for having a low barrier of entry than trying to teach full stack web development from scratch.

Sign up for our mailing list (link in profile), that's what we are building (and more including support for collab editing, version control, and cloud native deployments).

That's a separate issue from dependency management entirely. Check out Repl.it's universal package manager if you want an idea of how we are solving the problem.

Mito looks really interesting, I look forward to trying it out. I'd there a way to sign up for Mito without the hubspot meeting?

For us we are going the opposite approach, we are building a VB interpreter to make it easier to run, build, and extend existing Excel programs. We allow calling libraries written in WebAssembly and GraalVM supported languages.

A lot of environments do not have easy to use hot reloading out-of-the-box (and also quick GUI creation support). This is the primary reason why development feels less intuitive in a lot of text based languages versus more visual tooling like Excel which can give instantaneous feedback.

Hot reloading is most famous for being a staple of Lisp languages (but they tie it to the repl rather than as a standalone feature). For Microsoft languages this is provided by Visual Studio (commonly known as edit-and-continue, it is available in some form or other since the original VB days). You can try it out with the embedded VBA interpreter in Excel (under the Developer tab).

For JavaScript this is a recent innovation (driven primarily by the React/SPA crowd). In Java, most IDEs have the feature but it requires a fair bit of setup and configuration (look up hot swap for Intellij). The closest thing Python has is Jupyter which admittedly is not that pleasant to use.

Not just Excel, the integrated scripting environment around it too. A lot of the heavy lifting in complex setups is done by custom VBA scripts.

Congrats on shipping this, this looks really cool. Reminds me of n8n.io. What is the reasoning behind writing the flow editor from scratch versus utilising an existing library such as Rete.js? Also, if you need some ideas on the visual programming side of things, feel free to drop me an email, I used to work in this space.

We are adding support to call WebAssembly and GraalVM supported libraries.