Conversation

Playing with some of the no-code programmable features of (pomodoro timer, kanban boards etc) strikes me that a) this has potential to be the first real no-code environment since Excel and b) it's a way to do Wolfram-style computational essays without Mathematica
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The {{table}} model is revealing. At once reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the nested list as first-class citizen. You're reducing 2d to 1d, so you have to choose whether it will be row-dominant or column-dominant. At the moment they have row-dominant as a design choice.
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lol, roam manages to implement a janky little spreadsheet right within any page using block refs. This is brilliant you're making the world's best turing tarpit.
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This is going to be really powerful once you can pull from random data sources, and especially if you can use block references to point to live data ports, like say a pollable IoT temperature sensor
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Roam is evolving faster than I can keep up. I'd have to block time out every month to catch up on new features.
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What's keeping this manageable is that Conor has discovered a really powerful source of conceptual integrity here, the nested, referenceable block model. Without it, this would be a duct-taped set of features that would fall apart. With it, it's snowballing into a Real Paradigm™
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Full disclosure, I've recently started doing some consulting for Roam too, but this thread is with user-hat on (am on the believer plan). If I were 20 years younger, I'd probably be trying to get a job with them.
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The thing about Roam is that it's the underlying conceptual model that determines what is easy and what is hard, so the opinionated design follows that. They could bolt on features which don't naturally fit the nested blockref model but that would probably add fragility/entropy
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I suspect some fairly minimal subset of the paradigm is turing complete, but that doesn't mean you should try to do everything with it. It may be better to think of Roam as a medium rather than a tool. A medium with a message. With literacy in the paradigm required to use it well
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I *think* I've explored all the main native features of roam... basic outlining, bidirectional linking, diagrams, tables, kanban, latex, calculator, transclusion, the graph... the only thing I haven't yet really tried using is daily notes. Maybe I should give it a shot.
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The only thing that I suspect isn't quite a clean paradigm fit is the diagram feature. It overloads the basic nested blocks structure in opaque ways and I'm not sure I trust it yet.
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One simmering tension I can see here is whether Roam naturally wants to be a visual tool or a textual tool that's like a beefed up command-line paradigm. I think it wants to be both, but that means really pulling 2d visuals into the nested blockref paradigm properly
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Possibly one way to do that is build native viewport control which should be straightforward with html5/svg. Something like canned viewpoints. * {{view}} * xcenter ycenter * xspan y span This is going to get into css like attributes and declarative nocode though :(
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