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This type of tool will only reach its full potential when it can really go both ways, i.e going back and forth from nodal representation to actual code seamlessly.

And by seamlessly, I mean not losing your loops and recursive calls after doing minor editing to the nodal representation.

This is - of course - not easy (and no surprise, this tools does not pull it off), but it's a goal worth pursuing.




Yes, it seems like there are very few efforts that work towards seamless visual<->text code editing.

Even for things like React apps where you have pretty clear composable building blocks in the form of components, I only know of Utopia[0] as an ongoing project.

I've worked towards having a React-based interface for OpenJSCAD with Landau[1], where one of the goals was having an editor like Utopia to make most of the editing capabilites available in a standard 3D editor interface that edits the variables in the code.

[0]: https://utopia.app/

[1]: https://github.com/landaujs/landau


Wow! Just … wow! Super cool! But how far has this gotten?


Landau has gotten "good enough" to replace OpenSCAD/OpenJSCAD for my personal 3d printing use-cases, where the main benefit I was looking for as a first step is better reusability via npm packages and a familiar interface via React. E.g. in a non-public project of mine that contains a Raspberry PI case, I can just import a 3D model of the RPI[0] to visually ensure that it correctly fits the case, and easily keep them in sync.

As I don't really have time to maintain it, development usually moves forward when I find time for my 3d printing hobby, so I wouldn't advise anyone to rely on it.

Since the space of alternative React renderers has been explored more and more in the last years (e.g. Remotion[1] for producing videos), I assumed that a "proper version" of Landau would exist by now, but AFAIK there isn't one.

[0]: https://github.com/hobofan/landau-rpi

[1]: https://www.remotion.dev/


The "problem" with this is insisting on a free-text-editable version of "the code", which makes everything much harder than it needs to be.

A better approach is to go the other way, i.e. maintain the AST and project it in an editable fashion, whether that be in a graphical sense, textually, etc.

This lets you constrain the edit gestures to things that are valid in the context of the AST, and avoids the problem where the user has typed a bunch of gibberish and you can no longer "back convert" to some other representation.

A really good (but sadly largely abandoned) example of this is https://mbeddr.com


I don't disagree with you ... I am simply noting that this is a problem area that seems generic enough to apply to a lot of situations, but there surprisingly seems to be very little research going on to solve the problem properly and in a general manner.




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