"No code allowed, but here's this thing called Coda you can use"

I don't agree with Prof. Alvaro that its okay to have only one user for your language. If it is useful, it should be widely used and not an obscurity. I am not a fan of Datalog and its derivatives. I am solidly in the Prof. Wirth camp, which is that Algorithms + data structures = Programs, and i believe the weak spot in computer science is data structures, as the fundamental algorithms are now fairly well known.

Friends, some days I simply don't know what we're doing. Open your nearest JavaScript console (or whatever) and observe

350680 / 8813712 * 2203428 == 2203428 * 350680 / 8813712

. I'm sure you all know why this is false. But what can we do in the face of such sandy foundations?

I'm a big fan of Crockford's DEC-64 proposal as a solution to the floating point problem

Not sure if it’s been a topic of discussion yet, but… “the economy”. Peter Thiel has been saying that he thinks we’re in an era of “stagnation”, where scientific and technological progress have essentially ground to a stand-still. The word “technology” today is almost immediately assumed to mean “information technology” of some kind, where 50 years ago, people might’ve thought of flying cars or underwater cities. Does anyone agree/disagree/have thoughts on this hypothesis, or on the nature and state of the global economy in general, as it relates to the future of software and technology? Big topic, I know, but relevant to thinking about the future, I think.

<!everyone> in case you missed the announcement (or forgot), the meetup at Dynamicland is tomorrow!! More details in #sf

Show FoC: I made a demo video of structure editing in sketch n sketch: https://twitter.com/NickMCThree/status/1110281821307191302?s=09

The LIVE Programming Workshop call for submissions is up: https://2019.splashcon.org/home/live-2019#Call-for-Papers-Essays-and-Demos Good (best?) meeting place for the interests of this community

Often when I'm discussing Dynamicland, I get the question: "why not just use a giant iPad" The only response I can come up with: - tactile manipulation is often necessary for learning - familiar objects, like paper and glue, provide well-defined affordances which cause minimal surprise, as opposed to anything in an iPad which will have surprising limitations

The goal of Field is to make the power of programming accessible to all. What if we could all program our own web, without having to complete a degree in computer science? What if making a webapp was as easy as writing a document?

http://supersystemic.studio/field/

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Do you guys know some kind of runtime that monitors memory usage / runtime and warns / asks whether to continue when either is unreasonably high? Wouldn't it be cool if your running program could ask things like "the for loop X will take ~5 hours to complete, are you sure you want to continue?" or "your program is about to allocate 20 gigabytes of memory, continue?"? My current approach is to just run my programs and hope for the best. If it takes a long time I'll probably abort and restart with print statements inserted at appropriate places and if the computer becomes unresponsive I'll try to kill the process before its memory usage crashes my OS. It'd be really nice if a runtime would detect these things and warn me, at least during development. A concrete example where I would find such a system helpful is the Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/). For most of its challenges, there are easy but slow and more complicated but fast solutions. Implementing a simple solution first and checking whether it works for the given input would be much easier using a runtime like the one I described above.

@Tudor Girba at PharoDays, Lille 😃

Do you experience “developer head” after spending 10-15 hours writing code? For me, “developer head” means difficulty socializing, difficulty being present and self-aware (being in my thoughts too much), impaired situational awareness, fuzzy vision, the tendency to lead with details and miss the headline entirely. The effect lasts about an hour after a long coding sesh. I see it in others all the time. Is there a name for this? It should have a better name than “developer head.” 😄

PHP6 has gone full "kitchen sink" approach, adding every feature they could think of. PHP selected a very interesting business model: you give away the program, but sell the debugger, and Zend systems has existed for a long time by trading free inclusion of a very powerful language into the Apache web server, while serving the market for professional programmers who are tired of doing "print" statement debugging. In much of the open source world this kind of bargain exists in different ways. It does give people a lot of free stuff, and then a much smaller group, perhaps 0.001% support the product. Red Hat does similar things, but i suspect does a lot better than PHP in terms of percentage of people paying. Red hat has the free Centos community version, then a paid one. As someone who made software for people in the audio/video/print publishing industries, my customers all lived and died by protection of copyright, and at different times in history their earnings were impacted mightily by piracy. Just because it has no physical cost to copy, doesn't mean it should be copied massively, and one of the reasons American/UK music dominates the world is our pretty good protection, but Napster, and the massive introduction of Asian pirated music CD's destroyed the CD industry. Not many people know that the CD wholesaling business was destroyed in america due to Asian product blending into the stream to such a degree that it basically ruined CDs. I think that Apple is among the few people left who care about protecting IP of software, and look at how much creativity they unleashed when piracy is kept to a minimum. I know that my opinion is in the small minority, but i would like to see people pay for software one time like they used to, instead of all these damn subscriptions. I don't want to subscribe to 100 things. That really bugs me, but if piracy is not controlled it is the only survivable business model.

"Perl tries to put the complexity where it will do the least harm, and where its victims may have the best chance of surviving it. " "Ultimately, I think that we’re pretty happy with Perl 6 being the “World’s Worst ML”, so long as it can also (simultaneously) be: the “World’s Worst Smalltalk”, the “World’s Worst Lisp”, the “World’s Worst Snobol”, the “World’s Worst QCL”, the “World’s Worst Erlang”, the “World’s Worst Prolog”, the “World’s Worst Python”, the “World’s Worst C”, and even the “World’s Worst Perl 5”."

I think discussions of conventional programming languages belong in #random. Who's with me?

Regarding "the programming environment is primary, PL is secondary" (see tweet): do you consider yourself to be working on an "environment" rather than "just a language"? If not, have you considered working on an environment? What is preventing a more balanced approach (assuming this is indeed a good idea)? https://twitter.com/stevekrouse/status/1115569100279951360

Many of us (in shaping the future of coding) are piggybacking on JavaScript for its ubiquity in the browser, flexibility, and simplicity. But it looks like we can now also generate & run assembly (WebAssembly) on the fly from within JavaScript! This opens up a new level of possibilities! https://medium.freecodecamp.org/get-started-with-webassembly-using-only-14-lines-of-javascript-b37b6aaca1e4

Well guys, looks like Microsoft has dropped their latest research language, called Bosque. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/bosque-programming-language/#!publications

i looked over the source code for Bosque. Hardly any comments. Code is for computers, and comments are for people (including the author who months down the road may not remember why something was done). Maybe in big companies you can slip through the cracks. I was also surprised that Boeing bungled the software so bad for the MCAS system, a critical system that only read one of 2 sensors, and had numerous fatal - as in killing people - mistakes in their software. I sure hope that all the designers here make an effort in your new language to encourage people to comment their code.

Nevertheless, I am also quite convinced that an enormous amount of complexity is software is (in many cases) simply due to poor practices or a fundamental lack of understanding (or proper application) of basic things like proper composition/decomposition/factoring of code, choosing more complex paradigms due to bias or hype, etc. If that could somehow be fixed (which may only be possible on a small scale, e.g. individually or on small team), I think that would do more for software than any new language could -- unless it truly was something fundamentally different than a traditional language

Has anybody explored FRP + Spreadsheets? That is, dump the FRP events into a spreadsheet and make that the basis of your programming model? Seems like there’s potential there.