Future of Coding • Episode 57 Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg • Personal Dynamic Media In stark contrast to the dismal, overbearing weight of last episode's Augmenting Human Intellect, this episode features a paper that is playful, joyful, a thing of charm and wonder. I'm no longer lamenting the future we could have had but didn't (mostly), and Jimmy does all the heavy lifting in terms of bringing sharp analysis and thoughtful reflection despite my best efforts to derail him. As usual, I'll throw a little extra flavour in the thread. Enjoy! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/057

https://vimeo.com/730788967 I've made a universal app in my language, single program running across multiple machines with function scope defining all interaction between the two computers. A server function can simply return a function that will be the client app. All variables in scope on the server and used by the client are available on the client. But the client has no way to extend the environment it is sent so does not see any value it is not meant to use. This was enabled by implementing an interpreter, my language was compiled only before this. The server function captures the AST of the inner function and compiles it before sending to the client. Because the inner function is compiled it is still fast on the client. I don't know if there are any other languages that do this. But I am interested to see where this idea can take me.

Step 2 in my grand plan for a mini empire of LÖVE apps: https://archive.org/details/akkartik-pensieve-2022-07-27 (video; 5 minutes) Not yet released, though. This is just a preview. (Previously: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CCL5VVBAN/p1656807435038059)

Agreed.

Huge fan of this Scott My first "tool for thought" was opening excel and treating it as a whiteboard – I could just use the arrow keys to get to new locations – I'd have some pages with extra wide cells, some with extra narrow – still the best diary I've ever had Knotend already has great feel – the simple menus and default font seem just right – example videos are great – the undo is pretty killer – overall 🤩

I'm trying to get better about sharing details on WhiteBox, the live debugger for C/C++ I've been working on for the last few years. Here's the first of what should hopefully be a long series of daily posts on it 😀 I've talked a bit about it around FoC before, but I'm trying to make sure I cover it comprehensively. Do let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like to hear about it/its internals/the philosophy behind it. https://twitter.com/whitebox_sys/status/1519114889905819651

What other things are similar to project. Could it be considered as an IDL. or at least the shared data model part. I'm currently using swagger as the root data model, but this is getting weird when we use it for messages not sent via http.

built a little thing with my friend Jake, https://glitch.com/~zoa-playground try pressing the letters on your keyboard, clicking on the little blocks (zoa), and connecting the Zoa together! I’d love to hear about what you find, code is up on glitch if you want to remix/make new zoa, be warned it’s pretty hacky p5 rn

Hey all! I want to present the first Alpha release of a project of mine that I've been working on for quite some time - Data Rabbit. It is a flow-based Clojure(script) live-coding eval/REPL canvas for "composable" visual exploration, experimentation, and data observability (yeah, that's a mouthful). Conceptually, it's a a remix of a number of different ideas. Think: Notebook + Whiteboard + Lighttable (with some Smalltalk, Hypercard, Bret Victor & 70s Flow-based Programming influences thrown in). ;) Basically, think of it like this... it allows the chaining (the "flow") of arbitrary ClojureScript eval & Clojure nREPL "blocks" that can also compose together into single (and recursive) views - with a heavy focus on visualizing the "data context" of the block's edges. Combine that with some handy "scrubbing" and editor eval features, and basic code generation helpers for common tasks - and I think it's pretty interesting (but hey, I'm biased). It's meant to run on your local machine and saves all flows as flat EDN files. However, the website (https://datarabbit.com) is running a special public version that ONLY has CLJS blocks & some fun small examples - but allows loading and saving flow files to/from your browser. So you can play around w/o downloading or running anything (no signing up or logging in - just start hacking). You won't have any of the cool CLJ nREPL block features, but you'll be able to get the general idea hopefully. The interface is fairly involved at first glance so please do watch the video before you dive in. I made one video explaining the website hosted version (this one here) where I run though the basic features & controls. There is a second video going up later this week where I go through every part of the self-hosted server version in detail, with a full slide deck, including some neat examples (dashboarding, CLJ nREPs, tech.ml.dataset, incanter, canvas drawing, etc). As I said - it's literally "Alpha 1 / Public Release 1" so there are bound to be many bugs, UI polish issues, and general wonkiness (although I'm fixing them as I encounter them). Thanks so much. Hope everyone is having a great weekend.

My compound graph editing tool now has undo/redo and jump-to-node: https://grapherx.netlify.app/ Also came across another open-source tool which has quite a few features (except the parent-child relations between nodes which was crucial for me): https://prsm.uk/

I have two books in me at the moment. 1. Domain Modeling - A tutorial to learn the skills of analyzing domains and encoding them in software. 2. Leverage Machines - A series of compilers for languages that give you high leverage: FORTH, OOP, Lisp, and Logic, each built on the previous one. I don't think either will be super popular, but I think you may be interested in them.

The final 4-minute demo for the project I did over at Handmade Network's Wheel Reinvention Jam last week. https://handmade.network/p/283/bifold-text

RFC: https://breckyunits.com/how-the-public-domain-can-win.html

I'm actually not so interested in the emoji's or colors. I think you are right that it makes things more "fun" though. I'm more focused on just seeing these things side-by-side in one space. I don't work with a ton of spreadsheets but I find the shifting between tabs as they get more complicated to be annoying. A lot of software has this property and usually falls back on the OS's window layout to deal with it. For example, in Google Sheets you can have multiple browser tabs for different pages or in IDEs you can open tabs for different code files. It seems like you can get a much better user experience with a layout engine focused on the matter at hand though. For a coding analogy this kinda reminds me of some of the original Light Table videos where functions were treated as the unit to display in a window rather than files (though I think that project eventually trended in a different direction and then became abandoned or slowed down significantly).

I'm chatting with @Jason Chan today about his new spreadsheet work (excited). His thread made me realize I hadn't made an announcement page for my spreadsheet lang/tool that we built at our wolrd in data called Explorer (free an open source, though getting your environment going is a pain, see my stripped down fork for what I use). Anyway, I just did "Add a language" to PLDB.com for Explorer (https://pldb.com/languages/explorer.html). If you've got a language you're working on, please add your language there too! The server that is running with write access is still unoptimized and pretty slow, so give it a second after clicking save. Or you can do things the old fashioned way and send a PR over GitHub. I think at some point soon, we're going to have a

originCommunity

or some keyword like that where you can list what communitie(s) helped you build/launch your language/tool. I expect when we look back at the data we'll see that some of the top new tools all shared a common origin of being at least partially developed in this slack community. Thanks @Ivan Reese and @stevekrouse!

I’d like to share a work in progress — https://skymass.dev SkyMass is a cloud UI Server. The idea of a UI Server is to wrap everything related to the “frontend” of a typical frontend/backend modern app and offer it as a simple to use service. This includes an extensive UI component library and services like authentication, localization, theming etc. This approach removes massive amount of complexity (CSS, DOM, React, bundlers, hosting, etc…) and allows us to build modern apps by solely writing a backend. The backend deals with accessing app data (eg: databases, apis etc..), app logic and uses the UI Server through a simple client SDK. Checkout a sample todo list app (only ~80 SLoC) to get a better feel for SkyMass: Live Demo: https://skymass.dev/app/skymass-demo/neon-todolist Source: https://github.com/skymasshq/skymass-demo/blob/main/neon_todolist.mjs

RFC: Sponsor a fact on PLDB (https://pldb.com/pages/sponsor-a-fact.html). A lot of people have been telling me to figure out a business model for PLDB, not just for PLDB's sake, but also so the model could be extended to other domains. This is the latest idea. Would love any feedback!

👋 hey guys! I’ve been working on a new project & I’d love your feedback. Lmk if you get a chance to try it out, read the docs, make something cool, have thoughts. Really appreciate it! 💗 Val Town is a collaborative notebook for APIs, for building integrations between different APIs, exposing your own endpoints with a single click, etc. I think the FoC community will enjoy 1) the global namespace where you can @reference friend's values, 2) using a database to store functions and values side-by-side, and 3)

console.email

& lots of other features that "fall out of" trying to turn JavaScript into a cloud-native consumer product 😝 New demo video (demo val from the video)

I made a CLI tool to expand tabs into aligned spaces, and vice versa infer the correct tabs from aligned spaces. It was a school project, so the documentation is in Czech (but code is in English 🙂), but feel free to contribute! I want this to actually be practical / at least inspire more practical tools, and to end the tabs-v-spaces debate with a compromise. The project is on https://github.com/ruza-net/columnator

It's 2022. The most popular coding tool that UX designers use to bring their design to life is the clipboard and IDE on a developer's computer (but not until the next sprint, when the hand-off ticket has been picked up). At Henosia, we believe that code should bend to a UX designer's will in real time. Here's an example of how we're bringing this vision to life in a React project that uses the Braid Design System from Seek: We've recently added support for Material Design (MUI), and will be fully supporting the use of a team's own coded design system as well. It's currently in closed Alpha, but you can sign up for early access if you'd like to get your hands on it simple smile

I’ve been adding more example SkyMass apps. This time it is the todo list app but backed by Firebase. The cool thing about this example is that it makes use of Firebase’s real time DB — If you open the app in multiple tabs, they will be kept in sync — all in ~100 SLoC Live Demo: https://skymass.dev/app/skymass-demo/firebase-todolist Source: https://github.com/skymasshq/skymass-demo/blob/main/firebase_todolist.mjs

GLUI aka GlooEye is now GlooData Here's a demo: Let me know what you think!

It looks great as usual, great summary video! one question, have you considered doing a VR version of this? that would be really fun 🙂

I just rewrote search on PLDB to be a lot faster and case insensitive. Lots of you folks appear on there 🙂 https://build.pldb.com/search?q=agaram

Future of Coding • Episode 58 Richard P. Gabriel • Structure of a Programming Language Revolution 🔗 https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/058 Today we’re discussing the so-called “incommensurability” paper: The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel. In the pre-show, Jimmy demands that Ivan come right out and explain himself, and so he does, to a certain extent at least. In the post-show, Jimmy draws such a thick line between programming and philosophy that it wouldn’t even look out of place on Groucho Marx’s face. Next episode, we will be covering the Worse is Better family of thought products, so take 15 minutes to read these three absolute bangers if you’d like to be ahead of the game: • The Rise of Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel • Worse is Better is Worse, definitely not by Richard P. Gabriel • Is Worse Really Better? by Richard P. Gabriel Also, note that I'm taking this episode as an opportunity to start a little community fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. They're doing unbelievable work to end childhood cancer, including offering free treatment and covering the travel, food, and housing costs of the families who come to St. Jude for care. Their research has helped raise the survival rate of childhood cancer from 20% to 80% over the past 50 years. If you'd like to support this fantastic cause, donate here to be part of the FoC campaign. Thank you.

This is awesome @Chidi Williams! So simple and powerful.

This update covers the last couple of weeks of my language, structural editor, and now cluster manager. There are 4 sections in this video but the last one is probably most interesting where I discuss type safe hot code reloading over a cluster https://vimeo.com/756510102/e9b0e530fe

Latest version of our Scroll language came out today. To see it in action click view source on a post such as this one: https://breckyunits.com/cancer-and-copyright.html

I made a program in my tree language Ohayo that let's you visualize the scores of your recent HackerNews posts: https://v20.ohayo.computer/?filename=ohayo.ohayo&nodeBreakSymbol=%7E&edgeSymbol=_&data=hackernews.submissions_100_breck%7E_hidden%7E_rows.sortByReverse_score%7E__hidden%7E__vega.scatter_breck%27s_most_recent_100_submissions_to_news.ycombinator.com%7E___yColumn_score%7E___xColumn_time%7E__columns.keep_score_title_url%7E___hidden%7E___tables.basic

My talk from Strange Loop is out. There will soon be a mini-site with a transcript, references, and a few additional notes and corrections.