Pretty sane! The first view you get is a visual representation of the architecture, which is a really nice way to get to know someone else's code.
Plus, there isn't much code with this setup because it's easier to add another block to the graph than it is to add code to do the same task. Here's an example of a graph [1]. You can click into each block to see its parameters [2]. Once you click into the code, it's usually just one or a few line definitions of what each output item should be.
It runs in CPU-parallel by default without any adjustments from the developer, so pretty efficient. Also it was made by the guys who started Thinking Machines in the 80s, which was the hot AI company at the time.
At the time, Ab Initio was considered a Data Warehousing or ETL tool. The most conceptually similar modern tool I've seen is Luna [3], though I don't think that's considered "Data Warehousing" per-se. Anyway, I always felt it was a cool way to write software, having a visual layer on top to describe data flow.
Plus, there isn't much code with this setup because it's easier to add another block to the graph than it is to add code to do the same task. Here's an example of a graph [1]. You can click into each block to see its parameters [2]. Once you click into the code, it's usually just one or a few line definitions of what each output item should be.
It runs in CPU-parallel by default without any adjustments from the developer, so pretty efficient. Also it was made by the guys who started Thinking Machines in the 80s, which was the hot AI company at the time.
At the time, Ab Initio was considered a Data Warehousing or ETL tool. The most conceptually similar modern tool I've seen is Luna [3], though I don't think that's considered "Data Warehousing" per-se. Anyway, I always felt it was a cool way to write software, having a visual layer on top to describe data flow.
[1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_FwFkbVFfnGQ/S_V4l062fNI/AAAAAAAABO...
[2] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_FwFkbVFfnGQ/S_V1P_C64TI/AAAAAAAABN...
[3] http://www.luna-lang.org/