Something I just thought that I hope is taken as constructive criticism: I think the Hand Made Network is doing much more for the future of coding than this community. My quick take on what's the issue is that they take the tools they have (mostly C and C++ from what I've seen) and fix issues they have with a focus on simplicity, Architectural Astronauts don't seem to get enough karma there to stay in the community. Also by generating usable projects and caring about actual users now and not imaginary ones in the indefinite future. Is this an incentives/objectives/organization issue? or I'm just wrong? 🙂

I guess they follow one of the paths for Futur of Coding. One that chooses to produce code that runs efficiently, by being aware of what a computer actually is. But, as a constructive reply 😉 , I am not sure that they are "doing much more for the future of coding than this community". At least because Future of Coding means so many things. This community addresses other FoC subjects. Like (for me at least!) end-user/non-experts programming which focus is actually opposite to Hand Made Network.

Hey, that is a good point! Few thoughts from somebody who is relatively new to this community and is more on the practical side (working on my project): - I love seeing some of the abstract conversations, they can be inspiring and thought provoking. They take me out of the specific problem I am working and give some new insights. - I don't think abstract conversations and practice exclude each other, they actually go well very together. Practice is boring without some dreaming, and dreaming starts to get disappointing when there are no results (practice). - from what I see, this community and Handmade don't share the mission. They are about rethinking solutions that are using a lot of layers and are inefficient, and making them from scratch to be more efficient and possibly elegant. This community on other hand is trying to make programming more accessible. In my view, that very often means opposite of Handmade - we don't care about performance, but about usability, and that often means putting one more layer at the top. - It seems to me there are quite a few projects on here that are being actively worked on, so I don't feel like it is all talk and no work!

I agree that both communities don't have the same objectives, but seeing dion system, low level academy and whitebox they have usable (and performant) things that cover topics we cover here like projectional editors, interactive explorations, time traveling debuggers (and many others in the project section).

I love the Handmade network; particularly the showcase channel. There is so much good stuff on there.

Maybe another way of expressing what I want to say: what can we copy from them to get to the level of productivity they have?

If I had to separate the Handmade network from Future of Coding, I'd say that this forum is much more academic. Sometimes to the point where i don't know the terminology/concepts that are being discussed and I gloss over it. Handmade seems to be more focused on building stuff. Not sure I follow your point about C++/java you made eariler @Mariano Guerra. Why are they 'opposite' to what Handmade does?

not the opposite, the same actually, they have projects that cover topics that are talked about here and we use tools and build projects that are talked about there 🙂

If I have a negative point about Handmade it is that they are very busy. There is just too much content to keep up with. That's because Casey does a good job of promoting it, obviously. But it makes it hard to keep up with.

I never heard of handmade network but I joined now to see what it is. @Mariano Guerra about increasing the productivity: maybe we should extend the 2 minute week channel to not only allow video's but also very short articles (max 1024 characters?) with some images. I have enough to share about my progress in incremental steps but I dont have the time to make a video that often.

Mariano wrote:

@ogadaki you should be more active on #C0120A3L30R 😉

Yes, I guess you're right! I first thought I would have publish there more often. But after trying few times, I found myself not very comfortable with the format. But I agree, I should try again! And I feet that my work with adcraft is not yet that much aligned with FoC. For now it is just a modified Scratch, trying to build some kind of community and to figure out how to manage this kind of project. Not very much technical novelties yet.

feel free to share that way, @Chris Maughan and me sometimes share text instead of video

Yes, just reading the Maikel answer and yours, and I agree it is a good alternative that will work for me.

Yes, I could certainly share more incremental/non-video progress. But I thought the #C0120A3L30R was designed more as a once-a-week-video format; with the idea that it didn't overload people. I agree with @ogadaki that the 2 minute format can be challenging; it takes effort to condense things to two minutes for me; that's why I went with #CCL5VVBAN this week.

Maybe we can move this discussion to #CEXED56UR?

I'm in favour of short (short!) write ups in two minute week. Should take no more than 2 minutes to read — I like that framing device. (Edit: turns out, good discussion of this here.) As for the original topic.. despite the fact that Steve Krouse seemingly intended for this community to be a font of projects, at current it feels more like a social club. Handmade Network might be the makerspace where a certain type of industrious folk are using common tools to build nifty things; FoC, then, is the lounge where folks from all over get together to listen to algorave and discuss "big ideas". It'd be cool to see more novel projects pouring out of this community, sure, but I don't think that needs to happen for this community to have value. Perhaps we just have a bit of an identity crisis?

Just copying from that thread, my preference would be for us to keep a clear boundary for #C0120A3L30R but use #CCL5VVBAN for non-weekly or non-video or longer video. We should use #CCL5VVBAN more! I enjoy following it, and wish there was more, and that I could get a sense for how fast different projects are progressing. Returning to this subject, I've been on the Handmade Discord for a while, but I've had trouble getting into it. @Mariano Guerra I had trouble following this comment of yours as well:

Kind of the opposite happens here, the projects that are active on two minute week are either low level (mu, uCISC), done in C++ (maudio) or javascript based (instadeq, flow editor)

You said later, "not the opposite actually," so I'm curious what you meant here. I'm curious where it overlaps and is in tension with how I think about it: Handmade is about the present of software. High- vs low-level feels like a red herring here. Handmade is about existing programmers trying to tailor existing tools to their needs in often quite short-term, tactical ways. It's not clear that there's a lot of reflection or discussion of how to grow the tent. Then again, it may well be that this is the way that wins out in the end. Maybe existing tools are good enough, they just need more community to coalesce around them. I'm glad somebody is exploring that branch of the evolutionary tree. This is a weak opinion. I haven't followed many channels on the Discord, and the project pages outside Discord feel like a maze. As a result, it's often difficult for me to know what a channel is talking about; I feel like I'm entering in the middle of a conversation. I've tried asking for links a couple of times but not had much of a response. People here seem to put more effort into being understood by new audience members. Thanks for the links to Dion on #C5U3SEW6A! I've often seen it mentioned but hadn't found the project page yet. Looking forward to checking it out.

As I said in the other thread; the trouble with Discord is the lack of threading; I've wound up having conversations with people that are woven between other conversations in a very confusing way. Discord feels like a bunch of people shouting in a room at each other, and it is even easier to miss things than on Slack.

@Kartik Agaram my reference is that there's a middle ground where we share some tools/objectives and for some of the most ambitious projects on the handmade side I see them getting tangible results for FoC-style stuff even when they are much more pragmatic, the "opposite" mention is the same but seen the other way, there are some projects here that are low level and progressing a lot (like yours) that overlap with topics in handmade (simple/low level)

I don't see Handmade Hero as remotely the future of code. I don't know about the rest of Handmade Network. Handmade Hero started 6 years ago and still hasn't shipped? Meanwhile 10s of thousands of kids, students, and others are shipping games in Unity/Unreal/GameMaker and other engines in months or weeks or even weekends. The old guard is angry and scared that what they use to do by hand has gotten so easy.

Handmade Network is a community, not the video game/twitch stream

Yeah, Handmade Hero itself is a bit cringe. (A lot of its ethos seems to be rooted in a sort of hostile frustration — but that just might be what I project whenever I hear Casey talk.) But projects like Dion seem super exciting. I could see @Rik Arends’s Makepad fitting in with that community more than it does in ours, as well. Whereas I don't imagine a project like Hest or Glance or (secret upcoming Chris Granger project) or Dynamicland would do as well there as it does here. (Where by "do well" I mean "receiving positive / constructive feedback from people who really grok it and can understand it in a very broad / historical context").

This might be controversial: analysis paralysis is no worse a failure mode than making the wrong thing really fast. So from that perspective I think neither community is doing much better than the other. Seen through the lens of end-user programming, we're both failing. And that's ok! It's a super duper hard problem. What we need is communities that are supportive while we're failing so we don't give up. (I also don't care that one is larger than the other. I get more feedback here, and that's what matters to me.)

You can improve the MPG on a car, or you can try to put a person on the moon. Both of which are important, but they’re wildly different goals with different outcomes. Trying to decide which has done more for transportation is an exercise in opinion more than anything else. It’s certainly the case that improving cars today has a much higher likelihood of a real impact, but the magnitude of discoveries that come from even a single commercially unsuccessful moon landing are incalculable. There’s a big difference between invention and innovation. And sadly, more often than not, the inventors are not the ones who bring things to market and get wide adoption, but without them, the Steve Jobs of the world don’t have anything to sell. It is because of work from folks in communities like this one that Dion (they explicitly reference hazel) can build a sound projectional editor. The demos I’ve seen from Handmade so far are really just like ours. They’re are all still just vingettes of things to come, not adopted, industry changing improvements to our future. And that’s ok - progress almost always happens slowly and then suddenly. At some point, we’ll see MPG improvements and if we’re lucky, we’ll see Buzz Aldrin bouncing around on the moon too. 🙂

I understand that they are different, but I would like to see some small scale rocket launches, some 2004 "DARPA Grand Challenge" cars driving 100 meters and then crashing and similar over here, the objectives are different and both communities have a reason to exist in different points in the "idea space" but the apollo mission/Mother of all demos/Xerox Alto needs incremental improvements and "low level" engineering innovations to get there. I would like to see more tangible experiments along the way, that's the only way to prove or falsify our hypothesis 🙂

Bridges for sure! Is there something more constructive we can do than just having members participate in both?

maybe trying to do some sort of quarterly demo reel and try reaching other communities with it?

Perhaps this is off-topic: that project page for dion.systems is precisely the kind of bullshit present in the internet at large that doesn't happen here. No sign of what it is, just a big request to hand over my email. It's fucked up. Who do they think their audience is, and why do they think this is a productive approach for a software project to take? I wish they'd at least embed the talk Mariano linked to: https://vimeo.com/479428925#t=17027s (Here's a screenshot for posterity, and just in case I'm ranting about something my browser just fails to render.)

The Handmade Network is focused on how things are built, right? Whereas here, we're focused on what things to build. I think that puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to production, and an advantage when it comes to ideation. Eg: I could likely do my day-job stuff so it conforms to a handmade aesthetic. But I can't do my day-job stuff so that it just so happens to bring about the end-user programming revolution.

A lot of the handmade community comes from videogame developers and they may overdo it some times but they understand that you should start building followers for your project from early on (I don't like how few details are on that page either, but I understand the attitude). We could try to learn some marketing skills over here, at the end of the day, ideas must be adopted by human minds, we may not like the name but that's called marketing 😄

w.r.t. the Dion twitter account... @Scott Anderson retweeted something that feels relevant: https://twitter.com/Enichan/status/1328092677506813952 [Summary: there's a link to a video of various SUPER ROUGH prototypes of a big-budget Star Wars game from early in its development. The person sharing the link adds the wry commentary: "but when indie devs pitch to publishers we need to have gameplay gifs that look like the final product"] Dion lucked into the same thing I did when I posted my first Hest tweet — if you can make your thing look cool in a short gif, you'll get a ton of interest and it will spread easily because it's easy to spread. That works for people with gamedev-derived aesthetics, but not for folks like @Kartik Agaram who are doing something equally interesting but not presentable as a gif.

Yeah, there’s a ton to learn from the indie game dev community about marketing. I’ve watched every video I could find on GDC about it and I’ve found pretty much all of them useful.

I talk about this in my interview with @Jack Rusher. The Hundred Rabbits crew are aces at creating short videos and gifs of their work. Scroll through their Twitter media feed — it's all color graded, and nicely framed, and there's stylish imagery in the background of their software demos that is purely decorative. They're so good at this that they live entirely off Patreon (which is a higher bar than Dion's twitter following, I'd say).

Most people mention being introduced to this space by the talk "Inventing on Principle", Steve Jobs mentions "Seeing how all of computing will be some day" by a single demo at PARC, many people at ARPA mention the same about the mother of all demos. imagine if we could produce one or two of those "idea packages" even if at 50% effectivity. Each project should try to find the medium that works better for them, for some it may be gifs, for others screencasts, for other conference style presentations or papers, for others series of posts or twitter threads but we should be trying to find out what works.

Hah — I was about to say "For the projects that don't gif well, we might need something like the original Rails demo" :)

The Light Table video was 4:30 minutes. It has had pretty close to a million views between vimeo and youtube

In this PhD Thesis presentation: the author says "continuously asking and trying to make me build a better story for Noria", "Initially I had these sort of hazy ideas for something that might be cool, and I think the two of them have really helped hone the story, hone the argument, for why this is useful and what the work should focus on". Academia doesn't escape marketing either 🙂 PS: The topic and the presentation are great, highly recommended

@Mariano Guerra when you think about those famous demos, also ask yourself where they led, and where all the bitter people you mentioned came from 😄 Marketing can be extremely useful. Marketing can also be a siren. It is up to each of us how we navigate that, and there isn't a single obvious answer. At least to me. Depending on what you're doing, follower count or number of views may be extremely useful. But it doesn't have to be. For me personally, the goal is to find 30 people [1] to collaborate with over the rest of my life. I started Mu because the existing stack makes it impossible for me to collaborate with anyone in my chosen style (not hemmed in by layers of the stack). I try hard to be accessible to everyone, but I also have some self-awareness that the direction I'm going is not going to be an immediate fit for everyone. Seen through my lens, a "mother of all demos" is something actively to be avoided. Perhaps that's just sour grapes on my part. [1] A couple of years ago the number was 200. In a couple of years it might be 5 😄

So to suggest something concrete we could do, as a community, to turn a little more of our activity and energy outward (and hopefully expand the reach of the community)... We've been talking for years now about the need for a community knowledgebase / wiki / zettel, so we can synthesize some of the ideas and connections we build up in our discussions into something structured and referable. This past year, I've been saying "If any folks in the community want to go ahead and build this, great. If not, then I'll lead an initiative on this at the end of the year / early next year." We had a group working on a "metazettel" project in quiet, but that lost momentum over the summer (I'll blame COVID). So, I'm now setting aside time in January to get the ball rolling on this. In addition to typical wiki-esq content (pages for single ideas / references), one of the things I'd like to have in this project are curations or editorial features, sort of like Steve Krouse's "Whole Code Catalog". I'd like to build some living, ongoing curated collections of: • FoC work throughout history by various underrepresented groups • projects by all the long-time members of this community • FoC works within various disciplines (eg: FoC in gamedev, FoC in graphic design, FoC in writing / research) • A better home for my Visual Programming Codex • etc By carving out a space and norms for this sort of content, and making it something that is an extension/outgrowth of this community, it will give us a coordination point to build up the "idea packages" @Mariano Guerra mentioned above, to workshop them openly amongst ourselves, and then eventually use them as the basis for something that could be shared widely (eg: as microsites, videos, whatever) This will all take a lot of work, but it's work that can be done incrementally, it doesn't require any wheel reinvention. There are folks here who want to collaborate on something within the community, but would find it difficult to jump into someone's pet research project, so hopefully this could be an outlet for their enthusiasm.

Adding context to @jonathoda’s visual programming presentation would be a great addition too (if he is ok with it)

(off topic but...)

hostile frustration

Yes! I hate this. "Exasperated arrogance" I call it. Casey and Jonathan Blow are both awful for it. I share a lot of their preference for technology and design so it's disappointing.

Circling back, I'm also curious to hear more about the Architecture Astronaut angle here. Is there some element of that in parts of this community? I hadn't noticed so far..

describing grand unifying patterns/abstractions and talking about how it will solve so many current issues but never trying it practically in a small scale prototype, thinking that describing those ideas in the abstract is the hard part and the implementation is a detail, it may be a cynic description of something that may just be analysis paralysis

Ok cool. I don't think that's what Joel Spolsky meant in his article, but that's just me being pedantic 🙂

on the hostile frustration at handmade, I think one reason is the feeling that the tools are getting so complex that individuals can no longer build a full game and wanting to go back to that moment when they could build a game by themselves, maybe FoC can provide the tools they can use to collapse some of the complexity tower to a level where it can be managed by a single individual again 🙂

I adore the Architecture Astronaut article (I've posted it here before) but I think it's slightly different to what Mariano is talking about. There's certainly a healthy chunk of the community here who are on a years-long journey of reading/researching very widely and not overly concerned with making something right now. Personal circumstances (baby) have kind of forced me into that mode. I do a lot of thinking but I have no time to code atm. For example, there was quite a lot of enthusiasm for learning category theory, and the work of Christopher Alexander, the intersection point of both of those with programming is quite far in the distance...

Interesting discussion. Handmade and Jonathan Blow et. al. strike me as a healthy response to the absurd complexification of programming. They are sort of like the “back to Nature” movement in the 60's, and the Whole Earth Catalog. Going “off the grid” of the tech stack. The FoC community strikes me as having more of a Sci-Fi attitude: shiny new technologies will solve the problem.

Handmade hero specifically is a little weird, because in order to catch up (now) you'd have to go through 100s of hours of video. If Casey feels frustrated about the level of complexity or abstraction of modern software he should have also made something less complex imo 🙂. Handmade con was good, Handmade network is cool. For @Mariano Guerra I don't think anyone in FoC is working toward providing tools that make creating a game by yourself easy. I believe there are many indie game creators and tools creators that have done this relatively recently (Pico-8, Twine, PuzzleScript, etc.). No one on FoC (once again to my knowledge) is building tools explicitly for rapid game creation. There isn't anyone really making a run of the mill Fantasy Console or Game Engine

Going “off the grid” of the tech stack.

@jonathoda I don’t know if there’s any overlap between HH and this one, but that description reminded me of: http://n-o-d-e.net/

@Mariano Guerra thank you for sharing hand made network. It’s really interesting to these communities come up. I do think there are still things which need a different perspective. At FoC but also in the handmade network. It’s not that simple to build group cohesion. What does really matter? What software does society need? Which value assumption are build into our software?

I don't see them as mutually exclusive: we need "thinkers" and "tinkerers" in equal numbers, and the fact is that the intersection between those two groups is larger than it might seem! The corollary to this is that building the future of programming is not a zero-sum game: for someone on Handmade to win doesn't mean anyone in FoC has to lose, and vice-versa. There are always going to be folks who are more willing to engage in building projects and showing them off, and we provide great platforms to do so in this community, but we have to be conscious that there are just as many folks whose joy lies in the more academic or philosophical pursuits. Sure, these camps are sometimes at odds with each other, but in order to push the needle forward, we need them both!

For anyone feeling jazzed-up by this thread, looking for ways to help our community grow and reach more people, please take a gander at my new post over in #CGMJ7323Z. We have one day(!) to put together some ideas, and find a handful of people here willing to send a boilerplate email to show that this community has some energy behind it. If you want to make a small but positive contribution, this is a great opportunity to help.

@Scott Anderson I'm also working on improving programming environments for game programmers. Nothing to show for now, just didn't want @Wouter to feel lonely 😄 Incidentally, I gave a talk on day 1 of handmade seattle about optimization. Very interesting to see this discussion since I'm a part of both communities.

ah yeah I saw your talk

Show us what it is! I worry that a few early folks (including myself) are causing us to typecast what "one considers" FoC. The future is a big place.

I'm not really sure if my application is future of code either...

@Chris Maughan — Your work is interesting. It doesn't land near the center of the vision statements we generate when trying to pin down what it is that makes something the "future of coding", based on examples like Bret Victor or Alan Kay or Nicky Case (etc). But it does match a lot of the individual characteristics we enumerate (like making things more tangible, fast feedback, alternative modes of working), and it does show an attention to craft that I personally value a great deal. So even though you're not (yet) trying to do something absolutely unprecedented, totally out of left field... the work you're doing, and the way you are doing it, is totally in-bounds here.

Thanks for that; I'd expect nothing less from our illustrious leader! I am much more of a builder than an architect. I hope that I can help take some ideas further forward and get them in the hands of end users. My main focus in life is to learn new things; and that's why I show up here.

I feel like the work you do could be named "how the present of coding should be but isn't", which relates to what thee Homemade people do, which makes us neighbors in a spectrum with some overlap at the boundary 🙂

Thanks! And good luck with the release!

I don't think the goals and aspirations of the members of this community are uniform (nor should they be). Given that, it seems weird to suggest anyone is doing "more for the FoC" than anyone else. All one can really say is that some project is getting things done along a particular axis, which may or may not be the one of greatest interest to any particular member.