Came here to post this, but you beat me to it! Nice. The tl;dr is that they're running a contest with a $10k prize, where you design and submit a novel programming language (ideally an unconventional one). They're also looking for judges, if you are interested in that. Current judges are some names you might recognize: Mary Rose Cook and Jordan Walke.

It would be interesting to hear what a novel language can look like! New lisp dialect (not that novel but still) comes to my mind, maybe prolog-like or something more crazy 😁 I guess they talk about textual PLs only, right?

Yeah, I think it has to be a textual language. But I imagine you could make a spatial language like IRCIS

Wow, that’s impressive!

Maybe someone revisits APL

Replit ceo says it can be graphical? not sure if I read the tweet correctly: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1285667493034565637

Displaying graphics is one thing. Making a nice GUI for graphical programming is a waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Is parsing all it helps with?

@Steve Dekorte Not sure what you mean by "it"

@opeispo If you make an APL, the first thing it needs to do is 3D print the special keyboard you will need to use it 🤣 (Sorry, I couldn't resist making an APL joke. Those APL keyboards )

I was actually thinking more like using OCR instead to recognise custom characters. So you write it 🤓.

Actually, thinking about that idea more seriously, we have much better auto-complete these days (shout out to tab9 again lol). APL with a decent autocomplete widget might be interesting...

Corporate hackathons are more about benefiting the corporation with publicity and hype, which can only be created by the labor of a critical mass of entrants. But despite the incredible value of this publicity - and the allure of glamorous prizes- virtually none of the entrants get compensated. In fact, it is an equation sorely in the corporations favor: the more entrants, the more hype, but since the prize pool is fixed, the cost never goes up. I would recommend anyone considering joining any hackathon to think hard about the power dynamics at play, and the material value of your time spent participating, especially when a hackathon requires you to use the corporation's products(consider particularly that for a public publishing platform, the more usage a product gets the larger its user conversion pipeline becomes). This isn't a novel observation - much has been written about concerning the exploitative nature of hackathons. And if as a potential participant you want the good-natured competition and dedicated time for hacking on a cool idea that a hackathon affords, it's always possible to organize your own jam, centered around and for the community, without any ulterior motives at play(EDIT: look at game jams like ludum dare for a very successful model of how this can be done). (And also, I think the word "grant" should be reserved for actual grants- not marketing contests. I like the idea of grants, and if a company wants to give grants, it should do so in a way that requires minimal effort by the participants, and focus on underrepresented people that badly need them)

I had similar thoughts but censored myself. Perhaps I shouldn't have.

@Kartik Agaram thanks for expressing that. I really like what replit does, the sponsorship(esp. of the foc podcast) and community work they do, and they seem to have a lot of great people there, so I also felt pressure to hold my tongue*. But after thinking about this since when the announcement was posted, I decided I don't like seeing the community being exploited more than I don't like rustling feathers. *to clarify: I meant this as in, I felt bad about criticizing an organization that I believe is doing quite a lot of good.

I think this contest is best for (eg) highschoolers, who don't yet have the network to throw their own jam, who (in theory) have a lot of free time, and who might need something to motivate them to take on a new challenge that'd be good for their portfolio even if they don't win. For folks in this community, we might stand to gain more from being a judge than being an entrant — maybe. And yeah, totally agree, some details of how Replit are structuring and promoting this contest are gross. But I think that's just capitalism — we here have the option to not participate in it, and I don't think that they do (what with investors to satisfy, etc.) Love that you shared these thoughts, Yoshiki. Even though Replit are a benefactor of this community, their support should not shield them from criticism, especially criticism that we could all learn from that will help us do better if/when some of our projects are turned into businesses and we're faced with marketing challenges and the pressures of capitalism ourselves. (And if Replit decide that they don't want to fund a community that reflects honestly and critically on what they do — though I expect Amjad et al would be fine with it — then there will be other ways to pay for the podcast, fear not)

Yeah, and to be clear, I think they're good people who can accept criticism.

It's easier to show up at some corporate jam and meet new people than to organize one yourself. You don't have to find the space, get the food, clean the place after, etc etc etc. Plus you'll likely meet people you don't know. That said I don't personally get the idea of jams/hackathons that take place online. I can make something on my own at home. Saying "this weekend is abc jam! just upload your submission online!" doesn't motivate me all. All I want out of a jam is to spend time with actual people, make some new friends, see a new venue, that kind thing.

When I was a teenager, these sorts of contest-jams were fun as I learned 3D modelling. A good way to get some audience (and thus feedback) that my work wasn't yet good enough to earn on its own.

Yeah I mean, there is a value esp. in the physical events. And I don't want to discount the individual moral calculus people are making in their heads when they decide to participate, which I think is often quite sophisticated, and perhaps a lot of what I wrote is more of a reaction to my own past naivety toward these events(and I think, there is some unnecessary paternalism in my original post I should reflect on...). My intuition is that the computing community in general would be healthier tho if there was a bigger focus on community-driven jams than corporate hackathons, but I need to do more research and thinking to substantiate this.

So what about a Future of Coding jam driven by the community and sponsored by... Replit? 😄