Some interesting ideas here on the interaction of text+mouse:

I have a new random question: Has anyone seen attempts to take a functional language and mix it with a graph database / query language? Today I've been wondering if you can have a standard "select" query from a graph DB spit out the resultant subtree(s) as an ADT (record) that a functional language can traverse/manipulate as normal in order to make an update. You could take the Elm Architecture and just swap out the Model for a graph DB, and have the update function trigger a query upon it that feeds data into the functional language.

Maybe the reason why nobody's invented the future of programming is that they always settle for only one of these paradigms 😂

Sounds like how my Onex works!

So I've been going through the "recap" podcasts and getting a good picture of where @stevekrouse has been and where he's going, and this community along with it; and I'm coming from a smaller community that formed in response to a discontinued VPRI mailing list, and attempts to collaborate, and finding other similar communities along the way, until ultimately winding up here. From all I've seen, it seems that this community is the biggest most functional group of such people out there, in the realm of collaboration toward the future of coding or Kay's "computer revolution that hasn't happened yet". And in particular, where Steve has been, the connections he has / has had, the following here, his involvement with education, etc. ... It seems that Steve is very much at a center-point of all this (at least from a community/influence standpoint), and in the very fortunate position to have been where he's been and connect and that he's able to be formally researching and developing this stuff as the main focus of his time ... I don't know that there's anyone else on the planet quite in that position of ability and center of influence. What I'm getting at is that it's my opinion that the best thing anyone can do for this collaborative effort / future of coding, is to enhance Steve's work & influence as much as possible, and also of this community. That's not to say don't work on your own stuff -- we need as many people doing that as possible! But as far as growing and empowering a community and an individual in a unique position to drive it forward -- whether personally or though his connections and influence -- I think there's enormous potential to focus/draw as much as possible to him & this community. If we help Steve succeed, we help this community & effort succeed. It seems that perhaps Alan Kay felt the same way, yes? So for example, rather than doing any further work to build up my own community from nothing, I would just direct people here. And anything we as a community can do to get Steve as much funding and sources and contacts/followers as possible, could have tremendous potential / payoff for the future of software. Seriously, he's in a very privileged position (and lucky to have some key influences & friends that helped him get there). Just saying, think about it

I think the step to take is transitioning from “common location for discussion” to “organized community”, e.g. having an individual or (preferably) group/committee that meets regularly and tried to make decisions that benefit the community

(@stevekrouse curious to hear your thoughts on all this since you’re running the show!)

Reading about program synthesis, I noticed a major implicit assumption in most programming tools. The assumption is that the format that’s best for reading code is also the format that’s best for manipulating it. I’m sure that’s often, probably mostly true. Really terse DSLs (regex, date formats, sprintf) seem like a good candidate where they might come apart. This is probably old news, but I hadn’t thought about it that way.

"I’ve noticed when I think about performance nowadays that I think in terms of two different aesthetics. One aesthetic, which I’ll call Never Miss a Frame, comes from the world of game development and is focused on writing code that has good worst case performance by making good use of the hardware. The other aesthetic, which I’ll call Do Almost Nothing comes from a more academic world and is focused on algorithmically minimizing the work that needs to be done to the extent that there’s barely any work left, paying attention to the performance at all scales." http://thume.ca/2019/07/27/two-performance-aesthetics

For those interested, I wrote about my highlights from Curry On: http://jschuster.org/blog/2019/07/29/highlights-from-curry-on-2019/

If you wanted to justify the claim “functional programming and PL theory are useful tools to learn”, how would you do it? What concepts and skills would you point to, and what real-world examples/applications would you use to demonstrate the usefulness of FP? For example, “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style” and “Why Functional Programming Matters” both use higher-order functions/composition on lists/trees to prove the point.

I'm often wondering about Uncle Bob's Transformation Priority Premise (extract here: https://medium.com/@zolipeto/extract-of-uncle-bobs-transformation-priority-premise-post-85ab20216fb1 ) Now I am wondering if it is approachable from another angle: using structured programmings 'Sequence, Selection, Iteration' as building blocks (maybe with some extansion eg. State). WDYT? Is there any research on that? @Prathyush For example I'd say these transformations would make sense: nil -> Sequence Sequence -> Selection (+State to branch on & StateSetter before Selection happens) Selection -> Iteration So I'd be interesred how structured programmings building blocks behave and relate when we use TDD or when we just refactor a piece of code.

Has anyone here (particularly Forth folks like @Jeremy Penner) heard of sourceless programming? I came across the term in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20550656, and the best description I can find for it is in some of the slides of https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wL2eqf7eHGEybsK0C4MUB4ibP1z6voyhgYfUSNhuBQA/edit

How would you render source code if you weren't tied to a 2D grid of monospace characters? I'd probably start by using a proportional font for all words in the code. I posted an example of this here: https://mobile.twitter.com/FKohlgrueber/status/1156152950093426688 After getting used to it, I feel like it's easier to scan the code in that representation. What do you think?

I was planning on posting this but @Kartik Agaram query for "sourceless programming" is a good reason. Please check out (still in Beta) www.kodou.io for an example of an API-first programming model with no downloaded source or dependencies. The Documentation page describes it. We are looking for feedback. Accounts only by request at this time.

There's a lot to learn from audio applications in terms of interactive editing

Are you aware of a tool (I imagine something like a jest plugin) where you can specify a unit test with all the inputs and their possible values and add logical rules to be able to omit some of the input permutations based on the given logical rule. The remaining set of permutations to test might be represented in a table (and I'd be prompted to fill in all these tests.) That does not seem hard to do at all, but maybe there is something out there. + is there any tool which does something similar under the hold? Maybe a proof assistant when we are specifying our types? Dunno it just seems there must be something and I can't join the dots.

@stevekrouse (or anyone more well read on this than me), I enjoyed https://futureofcoding.org/essays/dctp.html but I got tripped up on the part I snipped below. Is there any reason why you chose to sequence the buttons instead of expanding the domain of

button

?

does anyone know of any radical paradigms for navigating the web? eg: not treating web pages like documents, not treating history as mostly ephemeral, facilitating collection or breadth-first search, weird zooming user interfaces, etc?

The page-centric concept of the web (from a browser standpoint) is a bit strange to begin with, if you think about it. I think it would make sense if instead of "loading a page", you loaded a script, which then programmatically creates content. And then, why should loading something else have to make that go away? Perhaps loading the same thing twice would just give you two copies of it, just like if you run the same program twice or open the same file twice. That would also give "history" a different connotation

Even though Curv is a dynamically typed language, it doesn't follow the convention used by earlier dynamically typed languages of "truthy" and "falsy" values. The only boolean values are true and false, and the boolean operators (and, or and not) report an error if they are passed non-boolean arguments. The rationale is described here: https://github.com/curv3d/curv/blob/master/docs/language/Design_by_Contract.rst The summary is: 1. The distinction between "truthy" and "falsy" values is ad-hoc and arbitrary. It is rare to find two dynamic languages that agree on the definition of "truthy" and "falsy". 2. The truthy/falsy design breaks the laws of Boolean algebra.

I'm finding it a bit daunting to catch up on this channel's history. Is there a good web page that summarizes the current ideas on interesting directions in "programming" UIs?

Anyone want to do a group watch and discussion of some of the "curry on" conference talks?

Are there any yearly conferences that are closely related to FoC?

🕐🎢 If you were going to create a "timeline" view that showed the progress of execution of a program through time, what would you make it look like?

With 1000 programming languages to choose from, how to rank them? One important quantity that can be measured is MTTR BSOTTA -Mean Time To Repair By Someone Other Than The Author. This is what killed APL, LISP and FORTH; high MTTR scores. https://www.e-dejong.com/blog/2019/8/4/a-very-important-quality-in-a-programming-language-mttr-bsotta

This is just approximate (there's a known bug) but I wrote a script to pull all the links from all Slack messages. Here are the top links mentioned by number of mentions:

In terms of conferences this month in Europe, I just got my tickets to BobKonf in Berlin (featuring Conal Elliot and @Adriaan Leijnse, thanks Adriaan for the heads up) and PPIG (I know @jonathoda is also going) in Newcastle. Anyone else attending? Come join if you can! https://bobkonf.de/2019-summer/program.html https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ppig-2019-registration-65130919333