
Idyll: Interactive Document Language - abhirag
https://idyll-lang.github.io/
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mathisonian
Hey HN - I'm the creator of Idyll, it is really cool to see it here! To
respond to the other comment - I did post it a few months ago but it didn't
get much traction then.

Happy to answer any questions about the project, or why you would want to use
something like this.

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abhirag
Thanks for making this :) As of now I just export Jupyter Notebooks to html,
throw them on my site and call it a day but have been meaning to try Idyll for
some data visualization.

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rmbeard
Presumably you can switch between idyll and Jupiter notebooks using note down
and nbconvert with a bit of extra work.

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abhirag
Well, I have already put some extra work in making jupyter notebooks look good
when exported as html (for example -
[http://abhirag.in/articles/train_of_thought_1.html](http://abhirag.in/articles/train_of_thought_1.html)).
I am planning to use Idyll for d3 plots and such, but thanks for the idea,
exporting to markdown and then using Idyll was something I hadn't thought
about.

~~~
rmbeard
Nice notebook more railways around the world should be using notebooks.

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shalabhc
See also [http://aprt.us](http://aprt.us) as an interesting way to build
interactive diagrams.

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garyclarke27
Looks cool, would be a lot more interesting to me, if it included data io with
postgres database functions and views. I never use direct to table updates.
Being able to easily created a web front end to a database with a tool like
yours, would be extremely useful to me and I would happily pay for such. There
are umpteen tools for creating schemas and managing databases - most like
PgAdmin are pretty poor - I use Sublime Text. Unfortunately there are no RAD
tools available for creating simple UI's. All my logic is in the db so I just
need simple forms and display grids. I had a quick look at Envelope but
complexity of setup and poor documentation put me off.

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mathisonian
We are in the process of adding compile time logic, which will hopefully
enable more use cases like this. (so you could e.g. run a database query at
compile time and use that to populate the page). happy to ping you once this
is landed, or you can follow the progress here [https://github.com/idyll-
lang/idyll/issues/70](https://github.com/idyll-lang/idyll/issues/70)

~~~
mathisonian
In the meantime we support browserify plugins, so you could actually
accomplish something like you're talking about today by using a plugin like
[https://github.com/mathisonian/dbify](https://github.com/mathisonian/dbify)

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mimg
A somewhat similar in concept using attributes in markup is Tangle [1]

[1] [http://worrydream.com/Tangle/](http://worrydream.com/Tangle/)

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rmbeard
This looks very cool. Thinking of using it for my lecture notes. I like the
math support and that it seems to support d3 albeit with a bit of extra work,
am wondering how easy it would be to bulk convert from another format say.
LaTeX using something like Pandoc to markdown and then to idyll? Would rather
not cut and paste everything.

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gcb0
on the other hand, it seems too gimmicky and too focused on their favorite
scrollable interactions

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rmbeard
Still early days is my impression. It is extendable which is a plus. I think
it goes in the rightirection and can see myself using it. Which is not
something that happens that often.

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awake
This was previously posted about a month ago

