Introducing Pipeworld: Spreadsheet Dataflow Computing | Arcan
Now for something completely different. In the spiritual vein of One Night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan9 and AWK for multimedia, here is a tool that is the link that ties almost all the projects within the Arcan umbrella together into one – and one we have been building towards for a depressing number of years and tens of thousands of hours.
Pipeworld (github link) combines ‘dataflow‘ programming (like Excel or Userland) with a Zooming-Tiling User Interface (ZUI). It builds dynamic pipelines similarly to (Ultimate Plumber), and leverages most of the gamut of Arcan features — from terminal emulator liberated CLIs and TUIs to dynamic network transparency. It follows many of the principles for a Diverging Desktop Future, particularly towards the idea of making clients simpler and more composable by focusing on interactive “breadboarding” data exchange.
The following is a video (youtube) that joins all the clips in this article together, but you will likely understand more of what is going on by reading through the sections.
