https://mitchellh.com/writing/contributing-to-complex-projects I thought this was good advice for understanding most software projects. In particular, interacting with the material by making changes to the source as way to verify (and build experience with) the code.

it's amazing that mitchell still writes good stuff and writes code after founding a kazilliion dollar company, not many have done the same

For anyone interested in the notion of “information”, there are three papers that make great contributions to the discussion: a literature review (survey) of existing notions, and two derivative/follow-up works that make useful critiques and additions. Here is the survey, a follow up (critique and extension) and a second follow up (a taxonomy). The last can be freely accessed with a Jstor account, but I can also send people the PDF if interested.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/10/tools Teaser: There are two kinds of tools: user-friendly tools, and physics-friendly tools. Physics-friendly tools force you to grow in a specific disciplined way, while user-friendly tools save you the trouble of a specific kind of growth and discipline. Whether you use the saved effort to grow somewhere else, or merely grow lazier, is up to you. Most people choose a little of both, and grow more leisured, and we call this empowerment. Physics-friendly tools feel like real tools, and never let you forget that they exist. But if you grow good enough at wielding them, they allow you to forget that you exist. User-friendly tools feel like alert servants, and never let you forget that you exist. If you grow good enough at wielding them, they allow you to forget that they exist. When a tool allows you to completely forget that you exist, we call it mastery. When it allows you to completely forget the tool exists, we call it luxury. (Alright, I'm going to quote the whole thing at this rate. Skip to end.) There’s fundamental-limit phenomenology around minimum-viable tooling. A machine that flies has to have a certain minimal complexity, and building one will take tooling of a corresponding level of minimal complexity. Periodically, there is a bout of enthusiasm in the technology world for getting past the current limits of minimum-viable tooling, and so you get somewhat faddish movements like the no-code/low-code.. Premature user-friendliness is the root of all toolchain jankiness.. Simpler, more user-friendly tooling is the result of improved understanding, not increased concern for human comfort and convenience.

"Tree-sitter - a new parsing system for programming tools" by Max Brunsfeld

Love this arrangement for s-exprs https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1508908816783532045?t=o5bS9XnkylBUzSgR3BOqhw&s=19

Rethinking Visual Programming with Go - https://divan.dev/posts/visual_programming_go/

Code + direct manipulation interface with two-way binding for building diagrams: https://twoville.org/#index

Percival is an interactive in-browser notebook for declarative data analysis and visualization. It combines the power of compiled Datalog queries with the flexibility of modern plotting libraries for the web. https://percival.ink/

Hello again Future of Coding! Its been awhile, at least for me. I recently found this piece describe the example of dOrg and how they work as a DAO but also relate to the state (taxes and stuff) as an entity.: https://time.com/6146406/working-at-dao-dorg/ here is their site: https://www.dorg.tech/#/ And here are my short notes on the article: No Bosses: What It’s Like Working at a DAO #tags: #discord #daos #blockchain #article via zodiac discord https://time.com/6146406/working-at-dao-dorg/ some short experience report dOrg from the US paragraph head lines: There is no management team, and everyone owns the company Developers choose their own projects and control their own budgets The company outsources health benefits Conflicts are mediated and then voted on. Salaries are transparent Skill-building is still a work-in-progress. ==========> My question for you: What do you think about this? Would you work for a DAO? Why would you not? Why would you? Thank you 🙂

"Visual Programming Languages and the Empirical Evidence For and Against" (Whitley, 1996)

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of an active visual programming research community. Yet there has also been a noteworthy shortage of empirical the resulting research. This paper summarizes empirical data relevant to visual programming languages both to show the current empirical status and to act as a call to arms for further empirical work.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.31.8423&rep=rep1&type=pdf

I don't know that anybody in the Slack (other than Mariano) has actually finished a project and put it out into the world. That's unfair, but I mean, that's definitely the norm of our community, is everybody's working on their far-future ambitious goals and I think it makes for a nice change of pace from the regular working world where you have to grind out software that doesn't feel very meaningful or significant and it pays the bills…

—Ivan, https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/055 😂 Fightin' words! I do think Toby made a pretty convincing argument for working on products rather than prototypes a few episodes ago.

[Mod note — deleted a meme post. There's a GIF in the above post, but the post itself is about something [arguably] relevant to the community. In general though, we don't do memes here, and if someone finds a once-in-a-decade 11/10 banger, it should go in #present-company]

There are so many resources linked from Cyrus Omar’s course called “User Interfaces for Programming Languages”! https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~comar/courses/ui-for-pl/

How not to have a productive conversation :( about society narratives… https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1508959260905918465?s=21&t=qGXfuDEll5wrdhJ4ab_Zaw or how I found this tweet https://twitter.com/lefterisjp/status/1516344014487830528?s=21&t=qGXfuDEll5wrdhJ4ab_Zaw

The Early History of Smalltalk (1993) - http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

This is a pretty awesome story about a bunch of attempts at a somewhat-visual, more accessible programming language: by @Katie Bell

"Let’s call the category of people between users and programmers 'authors'" "Authors will be using widgets and programmers will be creating them, but the inverse will be true as well — programmers will want to use this ecosystem to share code, and authors will share widgets they’ve modified or composed from smaller pieces." An imaginary transcribed talk from 1990, at the edge of HyperCard's extinction Worth seeing just for the added alternate-universe screenshots https://medium.com/@modernserf/the-origin-of-hypercard-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicycle-for-the-mind-8d0f3287e561

Some amazing engineers that @Ryan Atallah, @Robin Stewart, and I sponsor on GitHub for their important contributions to our field (i.e. visual programming, low-math optimization, thought-as-code, etc): 1. Jamie Brandon (@jamii) 🛠️ spindleapp.co/GitHub-jamii 2. Paul Bricman 🤖 spindleapp.co/GitHub-paulbricman 3. Max Krieger (@Max Krieger) ⚙️ spindleapp.co/GitHub-maxkrieger 4. [Hopefully we can add Lordio to this list in the near future 🧮 spindleapp.co/lordio] ❓*_Looking for recs:_ Who else on GitHub should we know about?*

BTW, dunno if this is useful, but saw it on Hacker News.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168882

http://tomasp.net/blog/2022/no-code-substrates/ Really interesting post about coding substrate and what low code tools need to accomplish to replace code

inform 7 is now open source: https://intfiction.org/t/inform-7-v10-1-0-is-now-open-source/55674 for folks who aren't familiar, inform is a language for writing interactive fiction / text adventures and similar things it may interest this group because it is (probably): - the most successful natural-language programming environment - itself the world's largest literate program

I recently discovered reactflow which is a react component for node and wire interfaces (!) Are there any others, I have been hunting for a while https://reactflow.dev/

All the talks are up now at hytradboi.com (click on the talk title).

Math Augmentation: How Authors Enhance the Readability of Formulas using Novel Visual Design Practices This paper provides the first detailed qualitative analysis of math augmentation—the practice of embellishing notation with novel visual design patterns to improve its readability. https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2022/program/content/68734

An Immersive Environment for Embodied Code The increasing sophistication and availability of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technologies wield the potential to transform how we teach and learn computational concepts and coding. This project develops a platform for creative coding in virtual and augmented reality. The Embodied Coding Environment (ECE) is a flow-based visual coding system designed to increase physical engagement with programming and lower the barrier to entry for novice programmers. It is conceptualized as a merged digital/physical workspace where spatial representation of code, the visual outputs of the code, and user interactions and edit histories are co-located in a virtual 3D space. https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2022/program/content/72166

Oh my god, I can totally see how this works… https://twitter.com/soychotic/status/1520126831478951936

Blockly Developer conference is running tomorrow and wednesday. One of the staff talks is this video showing how by serializing the state of a JS Interpreter, and taking diffs as the state changes, you can build a javascript debugger that has "next" and "previous" options for navigating the code execution.