
Idyll Language – Author interactive narratives for the web - iamwil
https://idyll-lang.org/
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mathisonian
It's great to see Idyll pop up on HN. I'm the creator of the project and have
been working on it as part of my PhD research at the University of Washington.

We've had a busy year, including receiving a donation from Albert Wenger [1],
which is being used to hire another developer to work on the project. Feel
free to ask any questions in this thread and I'll do my best to provide
thoughtful responses.

[1] [http://continuations.com/post/166234021110/support-idyll-
int...](http://continuations.com/post/166234021110/support-idyll-interactive-
narratives)

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z1mm32m4n
This library looks really cool!

Frequently I'll have a data set (list of transactions over time, log of
analytics events to a site, etc.) that I want to visualize. It usually
involves slicing the data in multiple ways with a handful of queries.

It'd be really cool if I could load up a CSV file / SQLite database _per
document_ and embed charts that visualize queries on that data. The goal would
be to keep the data, visualizations, and text as close together as possible.

Short of this feature being available, I can only do something like:

\- write some SQLite queries

\- write a quick script to run each query, and save the results to a file
(CSV/JSON)

\- reference each individual file from the Idyll document

Again, really cool project!

~~~
garyclarke27
Agreed ‘out of the box’ sql data source (postgres for me) would be a killer
feature to add. SQL is just text, but amazingly powerful and a million times
more useful than a file reference.

~~~
mathisonian
Agreed that this would be really nice to have! We are working on a compile-
time plugin system, so it should be possible to setup something the executes
embedded SQL at compile time to allow generation of more dynamic documents.

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hardmath123
I'm a big fan of Idyll, especially how easy it is to get started with. Here's
a screenshot of something I made not more than 20 minutes after first seeing
it [1].

Also, can I put in a plug for nearley [2], the parsing library that Idyll
uses? The Idyll parser is here [3].

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/5I143](https://imgur.com/a/5I143)

[2] [http://nearley.js.org](http://nearley.js.org)

[3] [https://github.com/idyll-
lang/idyll/blob/master/packages/idy...](https://github.com/idyll-
lang/idyll/blob/master/packages/idyll-compiler/src/grammar.ne)

~~~
mathisonian
Nearley has been working great for us -- I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it
for other projects.

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dpwm
I was looking for something like this fairly recently. I can't remember what I
actually searched for, but I didn't find this.

It took me a minute to understand what interactive narratives were. It's not a
term I've really heard before so I imagined something more like a text
adventure. I'm so glad I clicked the link anyway because this is pretty much
exactly what I was looking for and it looks like it will work great.

I really like the project and intend to try it sometime soon. I am trying to
understand how mature this project is. The git log seems to go back almost a
year but there does appear to be quite a lot of development. The examples seem
to work well enough for me to believe this project has enough features to be
useful.

The documentation is rather polished and effort clearly went into it,
especially with the animations. The thing that keeps slightly perturbing me is
that it seems like it would have been less work to show the actual widgets. It
seems like the tooling should be able to provide interactive narratives for
using the tooling. Is this a long term intention or is it seen as outside the
scope of the project? To play with the widgets themselves in the documentation
seems like it would be really nice.

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UweSchmidt
It took me a minute to understand what interactive narratives were. It's not a
term I've really heard before so I imagined something more like a text
adventure.

How about calling it "a high level front end framework based on React"?

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CharlesW
> _It took me a minute to understand what interactive narratives were. It 's
> not a term I've really heard before so I imagined something more like a text
> adventure._

Me too. Here's a quick sketch at alternate messaging that might be helpful:

"Idyll helps you tell data-driven web stories using charts, graphs and other
dynamic controls that respond both to direct user interaction, and interaction
with the story as a whole."

~~~
mathisonian
Thanks for the input on this. Shaping the language around how to describe the
project has been one of the most difficult things for me so far.

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aeontech
Looks very interesting, especially the Vega integration. Thank you for
sharing.

Don't see any licensing info at first glance though. Any chance you could
release this under MIT?

~~~
mathisonian
The project is open source and MIT licensed! The licensing info is a bit
hidden since we converted to a monorepo on GitHub, I'll update to make that
more clear.

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jhbadger
I've recently gotten back into (thanks to cyber1 and Brian Dear's book) PLATO
and its TUTOR language, which despite being weird from a modern perspective
makes making interactive lessons (its initial purpose) easy. I've always
wondered why we don't have a modern equivalent to TUTOR, but Idyll looks
(despite obviously having a very different syntax), to be filling a very
similar niche.

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colinmegill
This is awesome.

