I propose — sincerely, this time — that the new name of our community should be: Feeling of Computing I've seen countless sprawling discussions over the years about the name Future of Coding. (Most recently, this excellent thread.) Some people like the name, but most seem to feel indifferent or lean negative. But we've never found a new name that people liked enough to overcome the inertial resistance to change, nor one that overcame all the problems with the current name. It was an impasse, with an unnerving sense that the name was mediocre, and that changing it would be good for the long-term health of the community (see also: moving off Slack), but no clear next step. The "Feeling of Computing"-style of name occurred to me on April 1st. I liked it. Introducing it as a joke (or maybe not?) helped everyone get past their automatic dislike of change. And the reaction to it, here and elsewhere, was more positive than I expected. My (biased) read is that the majority of people liked it and felt it (or something like it) could indeed become the real name. So I'm going to put it to the next test — let's talk about it directly as a serious candidate, not as an April Fools joke.

No-one hearing about it will have any idea what we’re about. Also, the title serves as a North Star for this community. So I’d rather the old name or something similar.

I think "Feelings of Computering" does a better job of capturing the exploratory and novel nature of the ideas discussed. It's also going to be easier to do web searches for. "Feeling of Computing" sounds normal enough to have come out of a mega corporation.

I like the sillier name as well. It is also fun to think about all the different synonyms (or not) for words that start with F and C, and imagine the name morphing continuously. Figuring of Compassion? Foreboding of Calculus? Foolishness of Contemplating?

Coding seems less corporate than computing and captures “process” better I think. Feeling of Code Oh wait I’m copying Daniel Shiffman (Nature of Code). Maybe this is how he arrived at the name haha. “Code” also captures the ideas of exploring meaning, interpretation, language. “Computation” or “Computing” sounds like number crunching. “Computering” even as a silly name escapes that.

"Computering" was the more accurate part of the new name, IMO. "Feelings" are part of the picture, but just a part. We aim, ultimately, to build technical artifacts.

Worth flagging: one explicit goal of the new name is to broaden the scope of the community, and encourage people to join who would otherwise not participate in a group dedicated to computer programming.

I really like the proposed name. It captures the spirit of what folks share here, and would help open this community to a broader range of perspectives. "Future" feels incredibly limiting as our north star. I've second guessed posting things here because of a worry that it doesn't fit the "future" part of the community's name. I would love to see more ideas shared about how some piece of computing makes you feel, without worrying like about an implicit question of "but is this the future?".

I consider myself outvoted.

I like the thought direction of "Feeling of Coding" I worry that it's a move towards a less sciency space My tongue and brain are getting hiccups from the missing "The" before "Feeling of" while "Feelings of" doesn't suffer from that Computering over Computing for sure, there's a Feeling of Puttering about it, which is swell :-)

Another factor: people frequently called our community the "future of code". This bothered me, because it was wrong, but eventually I learned to laugh about it. Now when Lu says "Future of Code-ing" on the podcast, I add a little bell sound. A name that is easily misremembered or confused can be a bad thing, or a good thing. It depends on how you decide to feel about it.

Greetings I have arrived from the woodwork To toss my hat in the ring (as someone fond of "future of coding" but also fond of non-technifying spaces): "Filo Coding"? Sounds like "feeling" or "feel of coding". filo/philo = "love of". Hints at philosophy, though missing the sophia=wisdom part. Filo = leaf or leaf-like layers. Delicate and leaf-like in cooking. Philo also means "friend" in some contexts. Works as verb or noun. Downsides: still leans strong into "coding". Would be misspelled as "philo-coding". 🤷🏻

FWIW - I don't like the words "computer" nor "coding". Compute-er implies that all of Reality can be reduced to a pile of clockwork equations with a disregard for the dimension of time, implying that ultimately one should be able to walk into Radio Shack and buy an off-the-shelf, four-banger music calculator. Coding implies an emphasis on the creation of imperative, line-by-line scripts for scripting the behaviour of CPU-based machines using straight binary or assembler or any of the more-human-readable versions of assembler, like Javascript, Haskell, Rust, etc. To me, "coding" is about h2mc (human to machine code) and excludes h2h (human to human) aspects of communication (2 separable concerns). The innovation that we're dealing with is not programming but is reprogramming. We've known how to create machines (i.e. "program") for centuries, but, now we're exploring how to create machines that can be repurposed without the need to machine new parts. It's the creation of a kind of meta-machine. I favour something like ReMics (like the word "physics" but for Reprogrammable Machines) or FoRM (Future of Reprogrammable Machines). Mikey, currently responding to the appellation "Claude 3.7" makes many suggestions, including "**Fellowship of Creation** - Focusing on the creative potential of reprogrammable technologies. "F" can stand for "fellowship", "forum", "facilitators", "framers", etc.

I think I like "Future of Coding" more as a name, but if the new name helps bring more people to the community, then I don't mind the new name at all. The computer is indeed a feeling, after all.

( Context for the previous post)

I like “computation” better than “computer” — the former is a deep area of mathematical study applicable in some way to most human endeavors, the latter a specific kind of machine that’s basically a clock with benefits. “Coding” is a fairly weak sauce word. “Computering” is a joke word, which is good or bad depending what you’re trying to communicate. You mention wanting to name the community in a way that will attract non-programmers, but nothing specific about what kind of non-programmers. Any more specific ambitions?

You could also talk to some non-programmers who might be interested first and see what names/framing they like

Ask them what associations they have with each name in a survey?

I'd start earlier really.. If a group of people are going to buy into an idea I think it's good to involve them in shaping the idea in the first place

For @Jack Rusher and anyone else who doesn't have it fresh in mind — the motivation for "Feeling of Computing" is outlined in this post, including examples of the sorts of people / discussions I'd like to see more of here. One relevant passage (emphasis added):

As a group, we’ve repeatedly expressed an interest in listening to these non-programmer voices, and incorporating them into our community. We want more members who are designers, artists, organizers, ethnographers, home cooks, dance choreographers — I’m pulling these from memory, but suffice it to say that we want to invite anyone who has interesting things to say about what the computer means to them to come join us in sharing this wild yearning for a better computer.

There are many people who would benefit from a better computer — finger to the wind: literally everyone in the world. A much smaller but still quite numerous and varied group would be the people who feel a yearning for a better computer. People who recognize the role of the computer in their life, and feel unsatisfied by it. Many of them will be programmers, because programmers spend a lot of time thinking about computers, natch. But what of the remainder? (I suspect this "remainder" is in fact the majority.) I want these people to feel welcome, at least more than before, but not at the expense of the folks who already feel welcome here. I want this hypothetical name change to be positive-sum.

What about "Feeling and Computing" or similar? I at least feel that's more conceptually coherent. (And BTW Ivan while your first-degree connections might have already made up their mind about FoC or whatever it's called, I bet they know some second-degree connections who might be interested.)

I've always used "computering" to describe hanging out with friends doing computer stuff, as opposed to coding alone. In that regard it does feel like a good match to Live / PX / the FoC podcast. But maybe not so much for this slack - I haven't seen anyone working together on anything.

I still think we all found this community with its old name and I don’t recall anyone wanting to change it before this (admittedly fun) debate.

Is there a title that would capture the idea of trying to improve the future feelings without sounding like a VC pitch? Humane computing? Computering without borders? Computers with friends? The socialist republic of computers?

Fantasies of Computation

@Guyren Howe — Here's a mega-thread about this issue from back in 2021. There've also been a handful of conversations outside the Slack about this (but I don't have links), and some backchannel discussions I've had with folks who were dissuaded by the name.

Keep it and next year the April Fools could be “Felines of Com-purr-ting.” (I think the new name is good honestly.)

I don’t think it’s descriptive of the community still. It comes down to what the community is about. I think it is about finding better (in all sorts of ways) paradigms for getting computers to do what we want. “Better Computing” or something like that perhaps? “New Computing Paradigms”?

The people here were attracted by the content and not the name. If you want to attract different people, decide who, change the content to appeal to those people, and THEN change the name to match the content. Just changing the name because some people find it off-putting is not going to make those people care more about the content, I don't think.

The name is the first filter that might keep someone out or pique their interest. If the name gives someone the ick, they'll never see the content. I think "don't dissuade people" is the #1 job of the name, followed by "attract people". The current name dissuades people.

Of course it dissuades people. And piques the interest of other people. And has no effect on other people. All of which tells us nothing about what changing it would do. People dissuaded by the name can still be dissuaded by the content after the name changes. There could be better names for Vegemite, but I'm likely still not eating it.

My experience is that there are people who would love the content but don't like the name. For instance, I'm one of those people.

But you are here, disproving the idea the name matters.

Please read the last paragraph of this post, and note that I've been told similar things by many folks over the years. Mimi first reached out to me via DM, and I had to encourage her to share this openly.

That is acknowledged. But it is not prescriptive about what the name should be, or predictive about what the effect of changing it would be. If the point is to attract the people dissuaded by the name, go find those people and ask them what the name would need to be, not us. And expect to need to change the content to keep them once you get them in the door.

Realistically, the content is unlikely to change until the people do. And you really can't keep expecting "the content" to keep people when most people will never bother evaluating the content. We all have finite time in our lives, and we use signals, like names of groups, to guide our priorities for what we evaluate more fully. Of course we can't make firm predictions about the effect of changing the group name, any more than we can predict any other complex social outcome. That's an unreasonable expectation. Similarly a "prescriptive" model or method in this domain (one worth the bits it's written on anyway) is a rare thing we're unlikely to get. "Just ask people" is not one, IMO, it's been tried with patchy results. But we still can be highly confident that the name does, in fact, matter, even before considering Ivan's first hand accounts. The real reason we wouldn't continue this discussion is that it's been at an impasse for roughly the entire time I've been here, at least 3-4 years. Ivan has at least found an interesting new direction, though.

@jamii

I haven't seen anyone working together on anything.

I very much care about this collaboration aspect. In the past I collected some major examples of us doing it on the wiki. However, you're right that there aren't a lot of examples. Not everyone here shares this desire or considers it a priority.

Thanks @Ivan Reese + @Mimi Reyburn, that helps me understand more - changing the name is as much about matching it with the current community as it is expanding it. I guess there's a tendency to have community X consisting mainly of people with Y characteristics want to diversify their makeup, so they try to appeal to everything-but-Y. The problem is that you're still centring Y then. So I think it's good to think about specific groups/individuals and what they might contribute/get out of joining and approach them somehow. You mention dance cheographers.. My experience of those and other body-focussed practitioners (e.g. live artists/performance artists) is they generally don't have a yearning to imagine a different computer. There are a some people who very much do though, e.g. Kate Sicchio and Joana Chicau. Knowing them I don't think they'd join a slack, but might well be up for joining an online discussion/panel or something like that. They are both core members of the live coding community though so I wonder whether it would be more interesting to create space for a new community to grow in between FoC + Live coding with its own agency.. If a name can be found for it!

I do feel this community is collaborative. It's not code PRs but lots of my thoughts are shaped by opinions here and that is definitely is an important form collaboration, as is attending demos and hosting them. For the name I do not really care. I feel this community is mostly about ideation and discussion on things technical but on topics beyond commercial software production. Feelings is quite good because it's about opinion. I think I would tweak it to "Feelings on Computing". Could equally be "Post-modern computing".

sorry to interrupt

I don't post much here, mostly just lurk and read about other people's work. I really like Feelings because it also implies an emotional sense of yearning for something better, and likewise computering has both the sense of exploration (in the puttering around sense as mentioned by @Arvind Thyagarajan) and the idea that computers could be much more than just coding/programming. So all this just to say I really like "Feelings of Computering"

I'll reiterate my support for Feelings of Computering just because it has some momentum. Other options: • Dissatisfactions with Computering • Fear of Computering

@Ivan Reese This is in some sense a marketing exercise, and you can’t make something compelling to everyone (the things that make it more perfect to some make it less perfect to others). The list of “people types” quoted above is all over the place, and it’s unclear to me that there is a single name that would work for all of them. That said, it sounds like “Humanist Computation” could point in the right direction?

Going to pitch in my two cents. I'm not a coder nor a computer scientist by any stretch of the imagination (my background is in sociology and teaching digital literacy skills to older adults, and I was drawn to this community by finding a podcast episode on Engelbart's Augmenting the Human Intellect, which I found very relevant to the things I see working with older adults), and since then I've been appreciating learning what everyone is in involved in as someone who is an outsider to the tech space. That being said, I appreciate the "Feeling of Computing" name. And to address some comments on not being able to have a name that is able to encapsulate everyone's work, we could always have "in" subgroups within the greater group of "Feeling": Feeling of Computing in Design, Feeling of Computing in Art, Feeling of Computing in Nature, Feeling of Computing in the Environment. In any case, whatever the name shall be, super happy to be here (even just as a lurker) to learn what wonderful things everyone is up to out in this crazy world. 👍

Oh so nice that this stone got rolling 🙂 I like "Feeling of Computing" or "Feeling of Computering" so far. Here my 2ct that might offer a new perspective, a materials perspective: Computering can be understood like any other craft. You chose a material, you chose your tools, you work the material with the tools. Sometimes the material is just clay and the tools are your hands. Sometimes wood and you need a knife, a saw, sandpaper ..., sometimes your material is willow and you use your hands to weave it into a basket. The tool is a technology, your special, skilled way of applying the tool to the material is a technique. When you build this way, the design of a new product does not happen in your head solely. It happens in a dialogue between you and the material, mediated by your tools and your technique. Each material/tool/technique combination invites different designs: a table saw pushes you towards straight, mostly perpendicular cuts, a band saw lets you do round cuts, a lathe guides you towards circular geometries ... This combination of the mind and the body, this embodied intelligence, this usage of your full being, not just the mind or just the body, is what makes those crafts so satisfying. People say it makes them feel rooted/grounded. Often the material tells a story of where it came from. When it is a local material, that you maybe harvested yourself, you have the opportunity to feel deeply at home in your specific part of the world. When I apply this perspective to computering, I see this: The material is the memory, the long array of bytes. Working on the computer always boils down to modify it's internal state, the bytes in the memory. Usually you don't toggle individual bits or use your hex keyboard to enter bytes. You use tools to change those bytes in a highly structured way, in bulk. The tools is a piece of software. It mediates between you and the material. Unlike other, traditional, tools from craftmanship, however our software tools tend to hide the material from us. They are so complex, that they are no longer see-through. We loose the contact to the material and there can be no more dialogue between us and the material. This is why I feel unhappy with the current state of computering. Maybe?: We lost the feeling for the material, that lies at the heart of computing. This community tries to reclaim it. Therefore the name should not just include the feelings and the comput(er)ing but also the material/the substrate/the substance, that we want to feel here. Looking forward to hear your thoughts on this and to what degree you do (not) identify with it. Ideas taken from "Material Driven Design"

I had a funny thought on yet another variant: “Feelings of Computeering.” Is Computeer coined? It makes me think of sailing and exploration. (I like Feelings of Computing though.)

I've always loved this (translated) quote:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

I'm certainly here because I want to teach people to "yearn for the vast sea of computation," which both permeates and sits apart from our world of atoms. While still continuing to learn to yearn for untold other rich dimensions that I have long been ignorant of.

I love it.

I still maintain that if you’re someone interested in the sorts of things we’re about, and you see a reference to this group, you’re not going to be particularly drawn to check it out from the name.

It's likely that we each have a different sense of what "we're about". I don't want to speak for anyone other than myself. "Future of Coding" feels silicon valley, like it's a hackathon sponsored by Windsurf or Replit, where the goal is to improve the productivity of people writing and shipping code. I am not interested in this in the least. (I was glad when we finally stopped running sponsor ads on the FoC podcast, because I hated having to gin up some reason for people to use Replit, because they don't in any way reflect my interests.) "Feeling of Computing" feels like something from the School for Poetic Computation or Folk Computer, where the goal is to reflect on what the computer is for, and how we use it to do our work and live our lives, and try to find different vessels that might express or be imbued with the essence of the computer. I am interested in this.

How about “Democratising Computing”?

Now that the name change is done, we should probably stabilize for some period like say a year. Then we can evaluate if there's been a shift in people and content, and if it's desirable.

"The name change is done" oh how I wish I shared your confidence!

“Done”?

I mean, I noticed it on the top left at some point! I think at some point @Ivan Reese you just have to make a call. It seems pretty clear that the historical name is not ideal. It's had long enough to prove itself.

The future of coding was adding feelings to computing all along!

Democratising Computing

Yeah, this one's good too. Truth be told, I like pretty much every suggestion from the handful of rename-the-community threads. They all capture different facets of what makes our interests interesting. But there's the trouble: if we have to pick a new name, whats the process for picking the one name we go with? I like the creative constraint that it has to have the "FoC" acronym. This is moderately important for me, as I've got to do a lot of work updating logos and the website and the podcast metadata etc etc etc, and then I have to do the PR-esq work of making the new name replace the old name in the public consciousness (lol, absurd but true). So this particular shred of continuity feels worth clinging to.

How do you feel about doing all this work once a year? Is that just an utterly unrealistic figment of my imagination?

You've suggested this enough times now that I'm not so sure of my initial impression that you were joking.

Well, I was joking at the start. But I also like that you took seriously some things I was joking about at the start. Was totally unexpected, but the results were good.

So, one way out of this logjam would be to lean into our indecision and say that the community officially doesn't have a name; it has some rules for what you're allowed to call it. For instance, the name has to have an acronym that's something like "FoC". You can call it "Future of Coding", or "Future of Code", or "Futures of Code-ing", because various folks already do. Or you can call it "Feelings of Computering", or "Feathers of Confusion", or "Field of Chamomile". It would be fun, and easy, to set it up so that the website picked a random name on load, or once a day. Would this be absurd and self-defeating? Yes… but in a way that feels a bit consistent with other things here. What would the domain be? It'd be futureofcoding.org, and feelingofcomputing.com (which I now own), and whatever other domains we want to use. What would the Slack be called? Who cares, we can change it whenever we want. What would the logo look like? Uhh have you seen the current logo?! It's an SVG that my vector editor corrupted when I opened it one day.

I love it. Just make everything "FoC" and let people imprint on it whatever they want. If they hate the community they'll call it something unflattering, and that's ok too.

"Fuck off, Claude"

Fear of Cats

So it wouldn't be renaming so much as _de_naming.

It's like the famous rename to IBM.

Fountain of Cake 🍰

Folks Opining on Computing Ed: there are a lot of good "O" verbs. Obsessing, opening. Or something "optimistic computing".

Opposed. We need something that invites the curious in.

Yeah, it wouldn't help the discoverability problem.

For Others Curious

Yeah, it wouldn't help the discoverability problem.

So, about that. I got an email from Google today informing me that a new page was no longer being indexed. So I logged in to my account out of mild curiosity to see what page it was. And I found out all of my pages are not indexed. After a couple of minutes of trying to find a single problem and finding tens (a pattern akin to using a profiler), I found I was ok with this. I don't care anymore about being discoverable. The world has changed in the last 10 years. It no longer seems important to me. It may well be important to others, of course. But for me, personally, meh .

These days, you care more that the AIs have trained on your site.

To the best of my understanding, 99.9% of people who come here do so because of word-of-mouth. I'm fine with that 🤷 (Re: discoverability problem)

@Guyren Howe and I are respectively on modernist and postmodernist poles on this thread.

"For Optimistic Computing"

Yes, but how many more folks might have seen the name and not come?

hopefully many

@Guyren Howe It's not a one-time gate. I know of several people who have been aware of the place for years and eventually chosen to come.

I'll probably stick with "Fantasies of Competence"

@Ivan Reese i love the idea of denaming and sticking with the acronym FOC! Open to interpretation, but retaining its historical significance.

I feel there's a Mandelbrot joke to be had somewhere here where the FoC in FoC Off, Claude stands for FoC Off, Claude...

There are 2 hard things in naming: computer science, cache validation, and off by -1 errors.

Many CS things are named poorly. Graphs and Classes among them.

(Just in case anyone isn't familiar with the joke, see here.)

ha

Would this be absurd and self-defeating?

You had me at absurd.

Fear of Compilation fits in with the trend towards late binding as a way to achieve maximum flexibility, but I may be overthinking it

"Fever-dreams of computering"

funky optimist computers

I prefer Feelings of Computing to this. XD

I'll just leave this here..

I don’t like how it calls itself the future of programming,

I really wish that was an "o rly?" cover instead.

Is that actually real? Not afraid to share my opinion here that “vibe coding” == “let’s make programming about not thinking + let’s create technical debt” instead of making programming better. It’s like the opposite of wherever Steve Jobs got his quote “computers are the bicycle of the mind.” Kind of funny that a book is promoting “not thinking.” What people see as “I’m more productive” is reallh just translating labor that was previously cognitive/creative/thought-focused into grunt work (checking if code was correct, sans understanding). To me that’s a red flag that this brand of ai is not good at a task and is just being forced. Ideally, AI’s at its best if it translates grunt work into no work, not useful human work humans are good at or that they want to do into grunt work

Addy Osmani… there's a name I've not heard since the early days of JavaScript framework fatigue.

Vibe coding, now the feeling of coding. It sounds like a generic trend in tech to make it more like small talk in the cafe or night club

It’s being used to sell products now though, which is kind of the opposite atmosphere of it.

I rather like Feeling of Computering. I also like that the bonus podcast would then be Feeling off Computering, which is frequently an accurate description of me. (Currently, Future off Coding free associates for me to "off-gassing", which while perhaps intermittently accurate, isn't warm or fuzzy.)