around these parts we talk a lot about the technic...
# thinking-together
e
around these parts we talk a lot about the technical aspects of the future of coding — what are some of the social or cultural aspects of the future of coding folks see? • See either holding us back from doing more future of coding flavored stuff out in the wild yonder • Or see in the future, allowing for new sorts of stuff
to kick off, a bit of a wishy-washy, hand-wavy example: currently computation is a relatively “localized” thing — the types of environments where code to be run is created are pretty similar (broad strokes) to the environments where the code is run, sort of like subjectivity, what if it wasn’t always localized to a single head, or even a head-shaped head?
(which also leads me to wonder what psychedelic computing would look like, but that is perhaps a digression for another day)
g
Old ideas in the non-local space, which still exist on the fringe, are in the coordination space. e.g. the Linda language and Gelernter's Mirror Worlds idea. Basically a blackboard system, but in addition to putting data there, you can put code to eval "in the space". I have yet to find something that helps me "think" with others better than being together. Collaborative spaces step things up, but missing DoFs/OOB-info we get in real life makes them, to me, simply "at the same time", which is not "together".
I wish I had better concrete ideas for how to do it, but getting all your thoughts out, to share with others, can move so fast, in so many directions, with so much information, that even just a phone chat is worlds better for me than online chat and edit at the same time. It's also about how well you know people, and how can tools (maybe this is a wedge to drive) help us get to know each other better when not in person? Make it about the social aspect in the context of coding/creation, as we do informally today. For me, a big mismatch there is the flow of chat, but hard to mark things like in a transcript so they don't get lost.
Things like read.ai are pretty amazing for meeting notes. If it could identify "issue X was talked about and functions Y and Z are suspects for an off by one error", along with links, that might be a small step for those who work with it.