[jierenchen]

This is exceptionally cool. Thanks for sharing and building!

When I'm using Sketch or Movie Maker or Logic or some other GUI-based >>x<< editing tool, the thing that keeps going through my head is: "Dammit I wish I had the abstraction tools that I have as a programmer. It would literally make this task 100x faster."

To me Ronin is some strong validation that all these editing tools would be much improved by a human-readable and programmable intermediate representation of what you're doing with the GUI. The GUI is just an editor for modifying this representation.

John Carmack did some work when he was at Oculus on something like this for VR: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs

These ideas are all in their infancy, but really excited to see people starting to make moves in this field.

Thanks again!

[sitkack]

FWIW, Autocad, being written in Lisp, had a repl that was fed via the UI, so that you could basically see what the UI was generating and write your own scripts based off that.

I haven't used Autocad in 25 years, so I don't know how much of this is still true.

[galfarragem]

Autocad still allows all of that, and, in my opinion, a lot of its success is derived from that. Even Autocad clones have a Lisp repl.

[GuiA]

They complement each other. There are certain things that I’d love to pull up a command line for (e.g. quickly aligning dozens of objects using a non trivial heuristic); but on the other hand there are plenty of things where the act of visually working through it, placing multiple options side by side on the canvas, rearranging things by hand etc., helps in solving the problem itself.

What would be really nice is if we had a solid set of standards for inter operation, such that I could work on the same video editing project in After Effects, through the command line, through some open source tools someone else wrote... etc.

I have a project right now where I have assets generated in Sketch, some other assets generated by Python scripts, all feeding into an AE project, the output of which gets fed back into some of the Python scripts... I can do great things, but it’s super kludgy/buggy to work with, and as a software engineer see so many trivial ways in which it could all be so much faster and more pleasant to work with (e.g. After Effects natively only supports very limited JS like scripting, so I have to have duplicated Python + AE code... and if the AE motion tracker could serialize tracking data for Python...).

I’m not holding my breath because this kind of computing, while more aligned in philosophy with the early composable UNIX roots, is IMO most entirely incompatible with the state of the (creative) software industry/economy (Adobe, like everyone else, would like to do as much as they can so that you do not give any of your time or money to creative software other than Adobe’s).

[jierenchen]

> They complement each other. There are certain things that I’d love to pull up a command line for (e.g. quickly aligning dozens of objects using a non trivial heuristic); but on the other hand there are plenty of things where the act of visually working through it, placing multiple options side by side on the canvas, rearranging things by hand etc., helps in solving the problem itself. > What would be really nice is if we had a solid set of standards for inter operation, such that I could work on the same video editing project in After Effects, through the command line, through some open source tools someone else wrote... etc.

The big challenge I see here is a two-way mapping between code/representation and GUI. Ronin here has code >> graphics, but question is how to have a clean mapping from graphics >> code?

> I’m not holding my breath because this kind of computing, while more aligned in philosophy with the early composable UNIX roots, is IMO most entirely incompatible with the state of the (creative) software industry/economy (Adobe, like everyone else, would like to do as much as they can so that you do not give any of your time or money to creative software other than Adobe’s).

I do wonder if this is going to be a space that gets disrupted. We're already seeing this with smaller players like Sketch and Figma going into the image space. Still GUI tools, but proves that the barrier to entry isn't quite as high.

Is the technical moat for audio and video THAT insurmountable? I get that people won't be making the next hot music video on open source software right now, but I personally could use something dead simple to compose together a bunch of screen recordings into a demo video.

> I have a project right now where I have assets generated in Sketch, some other assets generated by Python scripts, all feeding into an AE project, the output of which gets fed back into some of the Python scripts... I can do great things, but it’s super kludgy/buggy to work with, and as a software engineer see so many trivial ways in which it could all be so much faster and more pleasant to work with (e.g. After Effects natively only supports very limited JS like scripting, so I have to have duplicated Python + AE code... and if the AE motion tracker could serialize tracking data for Python...).

Whatcha making in AE?

[disconcision]

re: two-way mapping: see sketch-n-sketch (https://ravichugh.github.io/sketch-n-sketch/) for another effort in this vein