It's welcome here. It's fine. We don't mind. But it's better over there. https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CEXED56UR/p1680041884022849

Linguistics and Programming Languages - https://250bpm.com/blog:95/

A bit old but still an interesting read

"A Caret for Your Thoughts: Adapting Caret (T) Navigation to Visual Editors" by Elliot Evans I chatted with Elliot a while back about this so it's great to see it in action! Really cool to see explorations in how to "bridge" different styles of programming together!

Unreal Engine are looking to release a new language, Verse, that is halfway between their visual programming language, Blueprint, and C++. Text-first, concurrency first and typed. They are framing it as a metaverse native language, that they hope to open source and standardise (port to other game environments like Unity, roblox etc too). I’m interested to see what a concurrency first language will look like from such a large player in the games industry. Seems like it’d be popular in the indie dev space (I’m starting to look into learning UE atm, and hoping it succeeds as a better alternative to C++ 😛) (6:15 start)

The last couple podcasts connecting with programmer productivity reminded me of this article trying to trace software's impact — or not — on overall productivity. It's main claim is that software, so far, has not had the expected impact on overall productivity, and that the challenge is that it is hard and expensive to model the real world within the constraints of programming. (Maybe you read it differently!) It seems to me that this is one big challenge with end-user programming, too: many people don't want to think beforehand about all the exceptions to a rule that happen in real life, since real life allows you to address those exceptions on-the-fly. https://web.archive.org/web/20221206161753/https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/softwareisprocess.html

Electric Clojure (previously called “Photon”) is pretty exciting, it “fully abstracts over client/server state sync at the programming language layer” which I found a bit hard to get my head around but this new example site does a great job of explaining the idea. One of the interesting things I’ve seen made with it is this Clojure spreadsheet app.

It's a meme, but it's really good: https://twitter.com/azlenelza/status/1644789222082244613?s=20

In the space of making data end-user too CSVbase is another open/public data site https://csvbase.com/ (pay/subscribe to keep private data) Easy to get parquet too, just add

.parquet

after any data url About page https://csvbase.com/about Sharing data is as easy as pasting https://csvbase.com/new-table/paste even straight from excel The blog is off to a good start, teaching some basics https://csvbase.com/blog

Two algorithms for randomly generating aperiodic tilings https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/aperiodic-tilings/

TIL about the "International Journal of Unconventional Computing": https://www.oldcitypublishing.com/journals/ijuc-home/

StackExchange for programming language development https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/12k8oxy/a_proposed_stack_exchange_site_for_programming/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1

The early days of Linux https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/928581/841b747332791ac4/

Hey! Someone (@Rajath R) asked me for any links/references to delve deeper into creative coding-y stuff. So I updated my list of coding influences. You might find something new there (or you might not). Check it out if you're interested: https://github.com/TodePond/KnowPond/blob/main/coding-influences.md

Tooll 3 is an open source software to create realtime motion graphics. https://github.com/still-scene/t3

Someone is trying to boot Linux from a Scratch project. 😮🤯😻 In fact, it's a RISC-V emulator programmed with Scratch. Here is his journey (quoting the author):

I actually started this project with not very much understanding of RISC-V, but after a few hours of debugging I got the hang of it. The emulator was actually based of off https://github.com/cnlohr/mini-rv32ima, which i ported to Java a while back, and from Java I ported to SCPP (A programming language I wrote) and from SCPP I ported it to here [(i.e. plain Scratch)].

Regarding SCPP:

SCPP (Scratch C Plus Plus) https://github.com/Its-Jakey/SCPP

It's really interesting to see the creativity of people that learned programming with Scratch, then start exploring new horizons to eventually come back to Scratch. https://www.reddit.com/r/scratch/comments/12k8kvu/got_linux_booting_on_scratch/

Structure editing for Pascal, c. 1986. This video was recently produced by an enthusiast running the system in emulation.

LIVE @ SPLASH 2022 Video Playlist https://liveprog.org/

The future of programming: Research at CHI 2023 https://austinhenley.com/blog/futureofprogramming2023.html

an updated instroduction to https://enso.org/

Gregory Chaitin giving a lecture on the history of computer science through the lens of philosophy and mathematics. The link should skip the intro in this video. There are many more parts, so it’s not the shortest watch, but it’s very important material that is under-taught in the standard CS curriculum. /cc @Kartik Agaram

Very nice UI ideas for extracting information during LLM-based workflows:

Structured editing can show benefits in learnability, tool building, and editing efficiency in programming.

However, creating a usable structured editor is laborious and demanding, typically requiring tool builders to manually create or adjust editing interactions.

We present Sandblocks, a system that allows users to automatically generate structured editors for every language with a formal grammar available.

Our system's input reconciliation process acts on arbitrary syntax trees to provides consistent interactions across our generated editors.

Our editors' editing experience is designed to be familiar to users from textual editing but, compared to previous work, requires no manual annotation in the grammars.

Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers https://www.modular.com/mojo

"There it was — functional programming ex nihilo... Nobody would ever again wonder what good it was to allow functions to call themselves. And it was all so clear one could go home and build it oneself without any instruction book." http://paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html

I enjoyed this assessment. I lived through the shift to recursion. I note, though, that recursion and functions make sense only for single-threaded pieces of hardware which is how CPUs and Memory were perceived in the 1950s. Today, we can have bowls full of CPUs with their own local memories, which changes the ground truth about hardware. While it is possible to extrapolate recursion to describe distributed systems, the recursive mind-set leads to epicycles such as thread safety, multi-tasking operating systems, thread libraries, loops, etc., i.e. a generally horrible DX (Developer eXperience) for creating distributed programs.

A Study of Semantics for CRDT-based Collaborative Spreadsheets

Online collaboration is becoming prevalent in our day-today work. As commercial applications show, next to texts, spreadsheets are an essential tool for storing and organizing shared data. However, concurrent modifications of a collaborative spreadsheet can lead to unexpected results when they reflect implementation decisions rather than user intention.

With this paper, we systematically discuss spreadsheet operations and their semantics and propose intention-preserving designs in a concurrent decentralized setting, thus supporting offline operations. We further explore different data models for shared spreadsheets based on composed Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and give an implementation in the local-first framework Yjs.

Any folks here interested in doing this “watching group” together? https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/