
The Dreamup: A codeless alternative to the Web - escot
https://blog.antipa.io/the-dreamup/
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nexuist
I don't really see this as a Web competitor; all you need is for someone to
throw together a dreamup.js and then it should work in every modern browser.
No need for a proprietary application.

Secondly, the Achilles' heel of instructions.txt is that a lot of things in
web dev are just impossible for describe. Bootstrap and friends go a long way
towards given us some sort of standardized terminology to describe common
components, but not every site uses them. A lot of sites build their own. At
that point the usefulness drops, because instead of saying things like "give
them a little space" you have to say things like "give it a margin of 2px on
the top, -5px on the left, a solid #f5f5f5 border on the left, a border radius
of 20%...."

That being said, this is a good idea. The vast, vast majority of websites do
not need to wade outside of what is "normal." Everyone would benefit from
having a more accessible alternative to HTML & CSS, given that the current
alternatives look like Twitter and Facebook.

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Splizard
This is not codeless, the instructions.txt file that you include in the app is
where you write instructions in for what the app is, this is code.

~~~
kaishiro
My initial reaction to your comment was that you were being pedantic, but
after thinking about it more I'm actually in agreement.

As a developer I would find the lack of syntax and structure to be
frighteningly inefficient, not freeing.

That being said, I can dig the dream.

~~~
nielsbot
It's the AppleScript problem...

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savolai
It’s a call for discussion, friends. You may want to go into technical /
semantic discussion like nexuist and Splizard here are doing, and that’s fine.
A lot of the details are still missing to work through, indees. But if we jump
to solve that cognitive dissonance too soon, I feel we may miss meatier parts
of the discussion.

The whole point of the article to me seems to be to avoid that temptation to
be too pragmatic for a while, and allow space for seeing alternate paths to
the future. I admit that this can feel handwavey even to myself, but it can
still be valuable to start from a high level view. What if the world proposed
by the author were possible and true as is? What kinds of applications would
you naively want to build? That's what inspires me here. A worrydream.com sort
of approach, perhaps? :)

~~~
nexuist
This is a good comment. I think democratizing application building will have
all sorts of wild effects on the near future.

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ericathegreat
A familiar dream, that kind of misses the actual challenge of programming is
not the syntax. HTML _really_ doesn't take long to learn - at least, not the
kind that's being produced here. The hard part is unambiguously describing
what you actually want. That's what code _is_ , at a fundamental level - a way
of describing exactly what you want in a way that cannot be misinterpreted.

Consider the instructions.txt given; 'This is an application called "My
Bikes".'.

Okay, so what does "called" imply here? Is this what you want displayed in a
title bar? Or is this the name that should be used for links to this
application? Or is this text that should be displayed in large type at the top
of the page? Or is this the name you're going to refer to it as in other
"instruction.txt" files, when you want to link or reference this app? Or is
this the label that should be used when someone adds their app to their phone
home screen? Or something else entirely? I would argue that any of these would
be valid interpretations of the phrase, but I'd bet that at least some of them
would not be what the author originally intended (or even considered) when
they wrote the phrase.

Consequently, you might find that you need to say something more like 'This is
an application. The browser title bar should be "My Bikes". The displayed
heading should be "My Bikes" in large, sans-serif font. When other pages link
to this page, they should use the link text 'EricaTheGreat's Bikes'..." etc,
etc.

And you can bet that pretty soon, users of this language will start
complaining that "I have to type so much to get even the most basic things
going. Could I just simplify it down to something like 'title bar: "My Bikes",
heading text: "My Bikes", heading size: large, heading font: sans-serif"... "

Well look at that! In making this statement unambiguous, we've just created a
very verbose programming language!

It remains as ever a delightful dream, but unfortunately one that doesn't
actually solve the real problem - that natural language uses a lot of words to
say things that are ambiguous and ill suited to producing the desired outcome.

~~~
nexuist
This misses one particular market though, which is the users that don't _care_
how "My Bikes" is displayed. This is the Shopify / Squarespace market; people
that just want to sell/conduct their business, not design a website.

To those people a natural language such as this could be a huge boon to
business, because they could just spend an afternoon writing an
instructions.txt and publish the website that night rather than spending hours
figuring out how to use the built-in editor and customization options.

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jrmann100
The trouble I’ve found with English-based languages (Inform 7) is that if you
go beyond the intended range of examples, you very quickly start having to
learn specific syntax—syntax which could be expressed much more cleanly as
traditional code. Always consider how a new language model can integrate or
fall back on existing languages.

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thatwireshift
what about doing your web on word and save as html? doesn't seem like any code
at all.

