Just listened to the podcast w/ Jonathan Edwards, always found his work inspiring. great interview, thanks.

Some random notes as I read the transcript (https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/037): • His notion of 'simplicity' is focused on ease of learning. "I'm focusing on those kinds of problems that you would want to do with a casual programming, small scale simple problems solved simply. Application programming is the word for this. It seems to have fallen out of use, though, right? There used to be this clear separation between application and system programming... that there should be two domains of intensity of programming." Arguably what happened is that application programming became hard as single applications started having lots and lots of users. It's not that we need to add more terms for different kinds of programming, rather to notice that using the same app as lots of other people gradually causes you to descend into living in a favela. • There have been many prototypes exploring many different ideas, but one constant through them all is a deep faith in structured editing. • "What [abstractions] would be the easiest to visualize? Let's say you're programming with continuations and all these category theoretic abstractions that people love these days, okay? Trying to materialize those into UI is a Herculean effort." • "We've got to figure out a way of funding the engineering needed to redo stuff. We just can't keep adding layers." @jonathoda do you have thoughts on how your current work connects up with this? Is redoing stuff going to address the expert use cases as well? I'm interpreting it as rethinking lower levels of the stack so that say

ls

has fewer commandline flags or something. But that seems to require thinking through how current experts operate? • What to expect from his next project, Subtext Alpha: "It's a full programming system, a full graphical environment that you program in. The text shows up on the screen, but there's no text files. There is a textual syntax. It turns out that really, really is a handy way of defining and building a language, but the textual syntax is only designed to support simple examples and test cases. It's not designed to support building and editing and incrementally modifying code. It doesn't support everything you can do in the language." • "I think that I'm one of the oldest young programmers." [Ran into computers in 1970 at the age of 13.] • DEC is the company that outcompeted Data General, the company depicted in Soul of a New Machine. (That book is highly recommended.)