Convivial Computing secret bonus level unlocked! Abstract submission extended until Friday Jan 17, final versions next Wednesday Jan 22

Would anyone be interested in a conference that was purely a YCombinator demo day like presentation of working (even if alpha) software projects? That is, like a normal conference but no papers, no publications, no talks on theory or political analysis or anything other than demoing and discussing working code.

All credit to @Duncan Cragg. I could just never find it when I wanted to.

I've been working on a voice driven product, and it's got me thinking about programmability. Specifically users start to learn a set of phrases to accomplish things, which can become the building blocks to string actions together. It's kind of natural language programming, but I'm not confident that's the right way to think about it... just because the individual phrases are natural language doesn't mean the assembly should be. Anyway... I don't have any particular question or assertion here, nor have I thought about this for long, but I thought I'd mention it because I'd be interested in any thoughts.

Psychology of Programming 2020: July 29-31 Toronto http://www.ppig.org/content/ppig-2020-call-papers

I think this kinda isn't what people mean when they say end-user programming, but I think it counts: I found it interesting how the structure of the entire system being accessible and editable by the end user at runtime, including the core algorithms, is what gives the system it's power It seems some problems can be only solved in particular cases (Incidentally, if anyone knows of any attempts at composable approaches to typesetting algorithms, I'd be interested, the problem is interesting as typesetting a document is essentially solving a global optimization problem, not a bunch of local ones, so decomposition is hard)

Announcing the awesome program for the Convivial Computing Salon: https://2020.programming-conference.org/home/salon-2020#program

I see that the conference hasn’t decided to cancel, but I wonder if any of the salon attendees are.

System design should be done with users, neither for nor by them.

Allan MacLean, Kathleen Carter, Lennart Lövstrand and Thomas P Moran, "User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons", CHI '90 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/97243.97271) citing P. Ehn and M. Kyng, "The collective resource approach to systems design," 1987. Hat tip @Geoffrey Litt (https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1263296760547553281)

Hey everyone, I asked a question on Twitter about whether the concept of "liberatory programming tools" has been explored, and compiled responses here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jWwsUDY9mHe97moysNv0PoYYfkzNPOjkKZN2hrL0Fcg/edit?usp=sharing - figured it may be of interest to this audience.

I see that most EUP applications have a default design (in the sense of look) and are mostly focused on a declarative definition of the application. I think that design systems/design tokens would be helpful in having also a declarative way to specify the look of the app. Does anyone know an application that works like this, by having the option to specify both the frontend (look) and the backend (inner work)?

what other personas + use cases are good target vectors for EUP? https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1599657209185300?thread_ts=1599588394.135900&cid=C5T9GPWFL

i can’t find the original thread for the discussion on how often end users customize their tools, but an interesting case study is that the roam research community seems to do a baffling amount of work to get basic programmer functionality out of that app, which suggests that giving users control over a more powerful data model encourages customization. eg: https://twitter.com/catominor3/status/1297395298805985280?s=21

Hi EUP-ers! I was thinking about what are my personal fundamental drivers behind what I'm doing in Onex and the Object Network. I decided it was something like "bringing the empowerment we techies get from open source, open standards, etc, to non-techies". Open tech empowers us techies to do whatever we want, and to share that freely with others, not having to ask anyone first. Open tech was driven by an innate urge to break free from corporate bullshit and to empower the community. So what is available as part of some equivalent movement for non-techies, that empowers them and frees them from the Big Corps (and Big Govs)? Well, we have blockchains, IPFS, LBRY, Bittorrent, etc: these offer the promise to non-techies that they don't have to worry about censorship, taxes, copyright, surveillance, etc.. 😄 And we have classic EUP such as spreadsheets: no-one has to ask the Corporate Blob for approval to play with data and write some simple processing. And anything that enables user configuration, customisation, etc. So that's where I'm at with my fundamental drivers for my work. I was wondering if this resonates with anyone else here?

Moving tribute to Flash: http://www.flashgamehistory.com/

Curious if anyone here has used it and what they think

anyone know of efforts to internationalize natural language programming languages?

What are some examples of great domain-specific languages that are geared towards end users? I’m thinking about DSLs that are almost like a replacement for a standard app. Feel free to interpret DSLs loosely for this, they can have a GUI associated with them, but the end-user has to be able to access the DSL to have fuller/faster control over the app.

What’s the most empowering way you could title a debugger?

OK, here's a question I am being asked a lot but I have no ready answer but always trying to come up with answers on the fly: why do we need end user programming? I mean, I am totally convinced that democratizing coding is super important and will change the world. But when I talk to "normal people" they don't seem to feel the need. I always have trouble to come up with examples where creating and running code is useful, instead of just downloading an app or whatever.

A game by Nintendo to help people make games

I'm doing a lot of tinkering with spreadsheets as "end user programming" lately, anybody else doing anything cool in this space?

Anyone else sometimes read this channel name out of the corner of their eye as "end of user programming"? 🥶

What would be good options for end-user Android programming today? Simple single-purpose personal apps, with simple touch UIs (a few buttons, a menu, maybe a text entry field), but access to all the hardware (sensors, ...) and interaction with other apps (sharing). On-device programmability would be nice, but not essential.

So, I'm an EUP person at heart, and this ChatGPT thing has obviously got me thinking all over again about what programming would look like to a non-technical person. At heart, I feel it should be like they're "casting spells" over reality (or virtual reality). This tips into the area of cognitive modelling: how close the physical manifestation needs to be to be able to be abstracted up to a satisfying cognitive model that matches the human's intention. In other words, you cast a spell "make that banana green!" and it comes back a lurid dayglo green, that would be a cognitive dissonance because really, you'd expect to simply get a very unripe-looking banana. What are the elements of this formalised spell-casting, this "programming system"? You have objects (banana, this one, not all ones), attributes (green, the correct one!), a sense of time or evolution (went from yellow to green). You start to get into Roget's Thesaurus land: what are the key concepts for describing the world, our human world? Anyway, just a splat of the stuff buzzing around my head right now. Thoughts?

I'm really enjoying @Geoffrey Litt's writings since he started writing about LLMs. The latest one in particular is a great fit for this channel: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2023/03/25/llm-end-user-programming.html

@stevekrouse I'm curious what you think today of https://blog.val.town/end-programmer-programming after recent cataclysms. We all need to revisit assumptions, and I'm looking to crib ideas 😄

@Ivan Reese maybe there should be a #AI channel to gather these conversations. Or maybe someone should start a newsletter to cover the firehose of developments in AI for programming. It is exhausting just trying to follow along

A paper worth reading that (among other topics) argues that end-user programming should better be called vernacular programming: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3480947