Has anyone read Who Can Name the Bigger Number? It was just recommended to me at work

This was posted here back in March but it didn't get much discussion (at least, that's what the archive says), so I'm reposting: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.06777.pdf

How we reduced the cost of building Twitter at Twitter-scale by 100x

Rama unifies computation and storage into a coherent model capable of building end-to-end backends at any scale in 100x less code than otherwise. Rama integrates and generalizes data ingestion, processing, indexing, and querying.

https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/08/15/how-we-reduced-the-cost-of-building-twitter-at-twitter-scale-by-100x/ A summary from @Dustin Getz https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137567

I just finished editing and published the talk from Rust East Coast. Perhaps some programming theory folks could find it interesting! cc @Garth Goldwater

In a large Rust codebase, it can be difficult to find just the code you need to implement a feature or fix a bug. This talk will introduce Flowistry, a tool for visualizing data dependencies in Rust programs that can help programmers quickly sort out irrelevant code. I will explain what makes static analysis of dependencies a difficult problem, and I will describe the key insight in Flowistry that makes the problem tractable.

Presented by @Will

Introduction: Situating Critical Code Studies in the Digital Humanities

Critical code studies is the application of the hermeneutics of the humanities to the interpretation of the extra-functional significance of computer source code. “Extra” here does not mean “outside of” or “apart from” but instead it refers to a significance that is “growing out of” an understanding of the functioning of the code.

This piece also links to a few other interesting resources on the subject, including, the initial manifesto for critical code studies. I also liked this quote,

Still, reading code, even without interpreting its cultural significance, can be no easy task. Ask a professional programmer who inherits legacy code to maintain or, worse yet, to improve, and they will tell you about the dread of sorting out just-in-time code, minimally documented, written with hasty patches, full of compromises and workarounds. Even those who write their code in artistic projects can be shy about sharing their code out of embarrassment and self-consciousness. This shame is a product of the “encoded chauvinism” of programming culture, one that can be fostered on the internet as much as it is in classrooms [Marino 2020, 148].

Today's workshop on Unit with @Samuel Timbó is now up on YouTube: Thanks to everyone who attended, and to Sam for building and demoing such an impressive piece of tech!

I thought this article on why some writers use an old word processor called WordStar was interesting. I wonder if there are any implications here for editing programs? Some of the ideas — like comments — we usually take for granted in programming. But maybe there are some other worth-while take-aways?

Let me speak generally for a moment. I've concluded that there are two basic metaphors for pre-computer writing. One is the long-hand manuscript page. The other is the typewritten page. Most word processors have decided to emulate the second — and, at first glance, that would seem to be the logical one to adopt. But, as a creative writer, I am convinced that the long-hand page is the better metaphor.

Consider: On a long-hand page, you can jump back and forth in your document with ease. You can put in bookmarks, either actual paper ones, or just fingers slipped into the middle of the manuscript stack. You can annotate the manuscript for yourself with comments like "Fix this!" or "Don't forget to check these facts" without there being any possibility of you missing them when you next work on the document. And you can mark a block, either by circling it with your pen, or by physically cutting it out, without necessarily having to do anything with it right away. The entire document is your workspace.

On a typewritten page, on the other hand, you are forced to deal with the next sequential character. Your thoughts are focussed serially on the typing of the document. If you're in the middle of a line halfway down page 7, your only easy option is to continue on that line. To go backwards to check something is difficult, to put in a comment that won't show when your document is read by somebody else is impossible, and so on. Typing is a top-down, linear process, not at all conducive to the intuitive, leaping-here-and-there kind of thought human beings are good at.

No one actually wants simplicity

The reason that modern web development is swamped with complexity is that no one really wants things to be simple. We just think we do, while our choices prove otherwise.

later, continuing…

The same is often true of complexity. The real test is the question “what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve simplicity?” If the answer is “nothing”, then you don’t actually love simplicity at all, it’s your lowest priority.

When I say “sacrifice”, I don’t mean that choosing simplicity will mean you are worse off overall – simplicity brings massive benefits. But it does mean that there will be some things that tempt you to believe you are missing out.

Looking beyond the inflammatory fun title, how do ya’ll think this relates to the future of coding? Is a reason that visual programming is often just around the corner because folks aren’t willing to shed some of the complexity (read also as “power” or “flexibility”) of existing programming systems?

A nice essay on programming languages, but with a message that is much more general: https://journal.infinitenegativeutility.com/leaving-haskell-behind It's about the tension between "make better technology", "use start-of-the-art technology", and "use boring (but stable and well understood) technology". Different goals, different tools. Another example I have experienced a lot: mathematics and physics. Mathematicians work on new mathematics, mathematical physicists introduce state-of-the-art mathematics into physics, and all other physicists use 100-year-old mathematics from textbooks. And each group complains about the attitude of the two others.

Has anyone spent time with kamilalisp? I've spent the last week or so exploring it, and it keeps blowing my mind.

https://twitter.com/andygocke/status/1017509689695715328 :((

wee, new stuff from Eskil Steenberg: (not that new, he’s been working on things like this, and advocating for live debugger use for many years at this point. and yet, his stuff always seems fresh, and just…different)

Fascinating video that popped up on my radar today of Stephen Wolfram demoing Mathematica in 1989 I was quite blown away by how powerful and ahead of its time it was, even back then, with features like interactive programming in a very high level, multi-paradigm language for symbolic computation with rich, introspectable outputs and various thoughtful design decisions around interoperability, extensibility and API (as validated by how none of the API functions demo'd have changed AFAIK in 30+ years!)

https://github.com/Ruddle/Fomos „So what if an app was a function ? „

Faré gave a talk “Prototypes: Object-Orientation, Functionally” to our Toronto Lisp Group Sept. 5, 2023. My personal agenda is finding the “atoms” of programming (simplicity, clarity). I think that Faré nailed the questions of what is OO, what are Classes, what are Prototypes? https://github.com/metareflection/poof The slides from last night are https://github.com/metareflection/poof/blob/main/poof-slides-2023.rkt . With the caveat that the slides and talk are WIP. 30 LOC to implement Prototypes (and Classes) in any language that supports first class functions.

The Development of the C Language by Dennis M. Ritchie The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of today. This paper studies its evolution. http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/chist.html

For fans of Bret Victor’s “Inventing on Principle”, it only took a decade: (not affiliated)

Local-first has got me actually optimistic for future of mainstream app dev. So much complexity arises from the many client - 1+ server architecture.

Has anyone checked this out? CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course

It covers universal compilers topics like intermediate representations, data flow, and “classic” optimizations as well as more research-flavored topics such as parallelization, just-in-time compilation, and garbage collection. The work consists of reading papers and open-source hacking tasks, which use LLVM and an educational IR invented just for this class.

On Unity https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-alienation-marvelous-pursuits-and-the-new-nomadic-sciences

“Alternatives to Modern Programming Languages with Ramsey Nasser and Jon Corbett” from the Causal Islands Podcast

This month, we are joined by special guests Ramsey Nasser and Jon Corbett to discuss their work creating Arabic and Cree programming languages, respectively.

https://fission.codes/blog/causal-islands-podcast-ep03-alternatives-to-modern-programming-languages/

This podcast may be of interest to this group: "The Future of Programming" by Bruce Eckel and James Ward. What does the future of programming look like? In their opinion: • static typing over dynamic typing • IDE support is a must • the happy path is the resource efficient path • transparent concurrency • transparently distributed systems • embedded DSLs https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/82-the-future-of-programming/id1531666706?i=1000619939421

How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people

Macs have brought a great deal to us over the years: desktop publishing, design, image editing and processing, multimedia, and more. One of the few fields where they have failed is programming, despite many attempts. Here I look back at some of those opportunities we missed

youtube suggestions gave me this today

Loving this annotated bibliography of craft and interaction design http://jonas.lowgren.info/ncixd.htm

Saw this article on hackerNews … thought it was pertinent to me, albeit oddly phrased at time but the author is likely not a native English speaker (like myself) so that’s to be expected 🙂 https://zhangluyao.com/blog/make-something-nobody-wants/