I really love the concept of the product! I downloaded it played with it a bit, but I found it very unintuitive, and had some serious UX issues. I'm on a Mac.
* Scrolling the preview would often pan the entire window
* Panning the window was really sluggish
* It was really hard to drag lines, it felt like I had to be pixel perfect--I've been such a big fan of the idea of visual editor, but I really started to see what this user was talking about with wrist issues [0]
* It was really hard to modify a block of code, I tried mouse click + every different modifier I could think of, it felt random what allowed me to edit text, and then it kept "exiting" the text edit mode.
* Modifying a block of code felt like it was lacking a lot of text editing that a modern editor like IntelliJ or VS Code has.
* The auto complete had something weird going on, I don't exactly remember, but I think one problem was I couldn't use my mouse to scroll the list
* Small things surprised me, like how much white space mattered, like if I had an "<operator> .map", it wouldn't work, and I had to edit it to be "<operator>.map", which makes sense--but it was sooooooo hard to remove that space, because the editor kept exiting text editor mode by small user input mistakes
I kept thinking it was just a learning curve, so I really tried to not let little things get to me, and read the docs, but in the end I just gave up. It was just too hard.
1. Some of your points surprised me a lot, including "Scrolling the preview would often pan the entire window", "Panning the window was really sluggish", and "It was really hard to drag lines" – these should not happen. We are heavily testing Enso on macOS and these issues are not known. I know I'm asking for a lot, but would you be so nice and have a 15 mins call with me so I could see how Enso behaves on your end?
2. Some of these points did not surprise me – our text editor is really broken right now and this is one of the things we are improving for the next release. That's why we normally do not even tell people how to open it! However, if you had any issues with editing expressions on nodes (cmd + left mouse button), I'd love to know more about that as well.
Tried out Luna, back when it was first announced and had horrible performance problems with it back then. Decided to give it a second try now, as I still think there is place for a tool like it, but it's sad to see that it's still plagued with the same performance problems (even though I upgraded machines in the meantime).
Luna was our early prototype and it indeed had significant performance problems. Our new JIT compiler is able to execute the graphs really fast (in fact, in many cases we are up to 80x faster than Python nowadays: https://github.com/enso-org/benchmarks).
However, sometimes we see that the WebGL is super-slow on some machines. May I ask you for more details, please? The important bits would be whether you experience the slowdown when using the IDE (like dragging, zooming) or when waiting for data to be computed? In both cases, we would be more than thankful for an issue containing machine spec: https://github.com/enso-org/enso/issues .
Enso should work for you with the same visual performance as in this video (this was recorded on a few years old MacBook Pro): https://youtu.be/fQvWMoOjmQk . If its not this smooth, we need to investigate it, because this is something system / machine specific.
There is unfortunately no other way for us to improve and progress from alpha to beta, so we will be very thankful for help here! <3
I think you should hire a couple of game developers. With the small scale that Enso is operating at, there should not be having bottlenecks in the graphics layer. A game developer can easily scale the app to support millions of nodes trivially on a 2021 desktop.
* Scrolling the preview would often pan the entire window
* Panning the window was really sluggish
* It was really hard to drag lines, it felt like I had to be pixel perfect--I've been such a big fan of the idea of visual editor, but I really started to see what this user was talking about with wrist issues [0]
* It was really hard to modify a block of code, I tried mouse click + every different modifier I could think of, it felt random what allowed me to edit text, and then it kept "exiting" the text edit mode.
* Modifying a block of code felt like it was lacking a lot of text editing that a modern editor like IntelliJ or VS Code has.
* The auto complete had something weird going on, I don't exactly remember, but I think one problem was I couldn't use my mouse to scroll the list
* Small things surprised me, like how much white space mattered, like if I had an "<operator> .map", it wouldn't work, and I had to edit it to be "<operator>.map", which makes sense--but it was sooooooo hard to remove that space, because the editor kept exiting text editor mode by small user input mistakes
I kept thinking it was just a learning curve, so I really tried to not let little things get to me, and read the docs, but in the end I just gave up. It was just too hard.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27706356