While Inventor is amazing, I sometimes feel limited by the block system. I don’t want to jump away from Inventor to something like Discord.js, but I also would like to be able to use text based editing. Solution? Add text-based editing to Inventor
The entirety of the platform would stay the same, but instead of the flow editor being blocks, it would be text based code. (The trigger would still have a gui for editing stuff though) This would allow easy copying of code into the support chat, other bots, or other flows. It would also pair nicely with my suggestion to Add Git features. This would, as with Add Git features, require a lot of work to create a programming language basically from scratch, but I think it could attract more people who are either “embarrassed” by using block based programming or are limited by it like I am. This would also probably be locked away in the settings.
The end-goal is for flows to be able to seamlessly be changed from “block mode” to “text mode” and back, without any loss in data (except formatting). This would have all the benefits you described, with the primary one being the ability to move code between flows.
There’s a some problems with this sort of conversion but it’s definitely possible. For example, variables are currently referenced by block ID, so we need to either procedurally generate variable names for blocks without tags or force all blocks to have tags/names. Block tags also currently allow spaces which can be difficult for parsers.
The language/syntax will be custom (probably JS-like) but since you’ll be able to see what blocks generate, it shouldn’t be too tricky to learn. Before release, we’ll have proper autocomplete hints for filling in block names, etc.
