> Importantly, Penrose's vision is that experts will author libraries of domains and styles, and end-users need only express the substance of their diagrams (i.e. the three lines of code above).
In that case, would it be a good idea to start the tutorial with some predefined domains and styles? Part of the intimidation factor here is not just the programming language, but also the abstraction one is faced with using and trying to understand before seeing their first picture. If the goal is to have predefined libraries, then why not start with pre-defined domains and styles and first teach people only how to do the substance, and leave domain & style definitions for advanced tutorials?
What are the advantages of making everything a constrained optimization problem? I like the idea that I can experiment with layouts sometimes, but I don’t really want a random diagram all the time. I realize it doesn’t have to be random, I have the choice to explicitly pin things down, but that takes extra work with Penrose, I’m asking why random is the default. Having done a lot of technical diagramming in papers and books, I would expect to almost always pin things down, and maybe once in a while free up a few elements to move around. Letting the whole thing go random is rarely if ever something I’d choose, especially near the end of making a more complicated diagram. What I’m wondering is whether this design is good for experts, and why, or if it mostly helps beginners.
I recently discovered GeoGebra, and would love to hear some compare & contrast notes. It doesn’t use constrained optimization, and it does separate style from substance as needed, but in a different way than Penrose. The important feature seems to be that it lets you define the relationships between elements of the diagram, so if you move a point, the line attached follows, and then parallel and perpendicular lines attached follow, and so on, everything in the diagram becomes responsive to adapt to the change while letting you put something right where you want it. This way I still get to experiment with layouts, but nothing in the construction needs to be random. Most of the style definitions are point & click GUI actions. Are there reasons that workflow is inferior to Penrose?
In that case, would it be a good idea to start the tutorial with some predefined domains and styles? Part of the intimidation factor here is not just the programming language, but also the abstraction one is faced with using and trying to understand before seeing their first picture. If the goal is to have predefined libraries, then why not start with pre-defined domains and styles and first teach people only how to do the substance, and leave domain & style definitions for advanced tutorials?
What are the advantages of making everything a constrained optimization problem? I like the idea that I can experiment with layouts sometimes, but I don’t really want a random diagram all the time. I realize it doesn’t have to be random, I have the choice to explicitly pin things down, but that takes extra work with Penrose, I’m asking why random is the default. Having done a lot of technical diagramming in papers and books, I would expect to almost always pin things down, and maybe once in a while free up a few elements to move around. Letting the whole thing go random is rarely if ever something I’d choose, especially near the end of making a more complicated diagram. What I’m wondering is whether this design is good for experts, and why, or if it mostly helps beginners.
I recently discovered GeoGebra, and would love to hear some compare & contrast notes. It doesn’t use constrained optimization, and it does separate style from substance as needed, but in a different way than Penrose. The important feature seems to be that it lets you define the relationships between elements of the diagram, so if you move a point, the line attached follows, and then parallel and perpendicular lines attached follow, and so on, everything in the diagram becomes responsive to adapt to the change while letting you put something right where you want it. This way I still get to experiment with layouts, but nothing in the construction needs to be random. Most of the style definitions are point & click GUI actions. Are there reasons that workflow is inferior to Penrose?