Future of Coding is an online community with a welcoming, cooperative, and revolutionary spirit. We are unified in the belief that the common practice of programming is tragically less humane than it could be.

Future of Coding

Scott Kim’s Viewpoint Demo: <https://youtu.be/9G0r7jL3xl8?t=764>
At this section, he’s able to do some modification of the ui of a drawing tool using that tool. Most of the video seemed pretty meh to me (oh a pixel-based drawing tool), but I found this particular segment extremely compelling.

I think what I like so much about this is that the interface is plainly in the user’s control. We tend to create such a firm divide between the app and the rest of the computer (or the app’s contents), but I think we can gain a lot by relaxing that.
Obvious objections: The user can ruin the ui, and an inexperienced user is almost guaranteed to ruin their ui!
Can you have both? Is it enough to have good undo?

i really, really like this video. i’m glad to see it pop up again—i had completely forgotten about it! there’s a clear through line with this and dynamicland among other things, and the use of visual recursion is soo pleasurable to watch

<@UKDM3GLAJ> ruining my image was definitely a concern from my time in Smalltalk.  Undo and some sensible process isolation go a long way.  Comfort comes from being able to answer: would clicking this break anything?  One fun dynamic way to tell is to speculatively execute the actions available from a given state recording their effects.  Then you can indicate which is which: does it change the view, the document, a broader model.