Post: Visi 0.1 for OS X

Woo Hoo! Visi 0.1 is available for OS X

I Love Shipping Software.

And today, you can download Visi 0.1 and play with it.

Visi is a modeling language targeted at Excel and Access and HyperCard and FileMaker users.

Visi is a statically typed, functional language that's beautiful and easy.

Visi is a language for the Cloud computing and a wide variety of devices.

Visi is an open source project that you're encouraged to participate in.

The 0.1 release is a Mac OS X wrapper around the core Visi computation engine.

You are able to define models, load them and save them.

The parser will parse a model and send messages to the UI to update the list of sources and sinks (inputs and outputs).

The type checker works correctly and will type check.

The error display is just a raw "toString" of the error message, so there's no nice IDE line number jump-to stuff.

The only types currently supported are String, Number, and Boolean. Data structures and structural typing is not yet supported.

The computation engine runs correctly such that you can updates sources (inputs) and the sinks will dynamically change.

There are sample files in the distribution so you can see some basic examples of the code.

The release demonstrates that anyone with Xcode 4.2+ and Haskell 7.4.1 can build the Visi code.

The release gives people a chance to play with simple models and see how they work.

On the UI side:

On the core engine side:

Get data types working so you can define data and functions/methods to operate on the data
Git integration so that GitHub becomes the place where models are stored and shared
Finish support for structural typing
ObjectiveC integration so that Visi models can define interoperate with OS X and iOS UIs

I hope you (yes, you) will download Visi and play with it a little.

I hope you will join the conversation with questions and comments.

I hope you'll enhance the code. I'll be at BayHac '12 this weekend if anyone wants to hack on Visi with me!

Thanks!!

David