Yeah, in general I’ve been feeling a bit frustrated with this group because there’s disproportionate interest in prototypes rather than moving from prototype to “pilot project”. Doing that requires thinking about not just the narrow technical issues but the social and cultural context in which technical decisions are made. Right now this group doesn’t feel like it’s about the “future of programming”. It feels more about “ideas that may be the future of programming, if somebody else puts in a whole bunch of other work.” (I have similar complaints with academia in general.) I sense that some people here are working on more mature projects and startups that I’m sure think about these angles. But the group isn’t fostering such collaboration. I shared these thoughts with @stevekrouse last week, and one idea he had was to create a new channel. But I haven’t had time to come up with a crisp boundary for it yet. Might as well open it up and ask others for ideas.

even looking at some of the links and reading about people’s ideas here is very useful to me and it feels like collaboration to some extent. Also I enjoyed the first 1-to-1 I had last week!

Yeah, it’s definitely useful!

I don't see much discussion of the principles of programming for humans, etc, here, just lots of links to own or other's projects.

Not sure what you mean. Can you share some links examples? 😉 I’m skeptical that we’re in a position to productively think about universal principles. Programming is in a pre-Kepler state, and you’re looking for post-Newton results. But.. happy to be proven wrong. (One reason I like the “Future” framing: it doesn’t feel asymptotic like say, “the Right Way” or “Silver Bullet” or “correct” do. I interpret “Future” as open-ended. The goal is just to not paint ourselves into a corner, IMO.)

I am 100% in the "putting in a whole bunch of work" camp. I have a design that I'm in the many-years-long process of building out. What I like about this community is that I can come here to discuss ideas that will help steer my course slightly one way or another. I'm not here to look for a starting point — I'm here to look for things that'd help me make the most of the thing I'm making. Seeing other peoples' prototypes is really helpful to me, because it's a good way to communicate subtle ideas about the experience of someone's approach to the HCI of a programming.

Perhaps ‘frustrated’ is the wrong word? I’m just a lurker, but I joined this group because people were talking about something I was interested in. Are others under the impression that there’s a kind of implicit expectation of collaboration from this group?

I sympathize with both views: On the one hand, awareness & communication alone does a lot to steer & shape ideas that otherwise would develop in a box, ignorant if what's already been tried, it other things to consider it build upon. Alan Kay says about this that "perspective is worth 80 IQ points", and to "stand on the shoulders of giants" (e.g. by sharing in this kind of environment and building on each other's ideas). On the other hand, changing things is a serious matter to me (and I've heard the same from others). It's the potential, but also that the current state is far below what it already could be. I mean, software is the tool we use to make software; so we should be able to extrapolate the most amazing tools to do things better; and the best tools for making the best tools; etc. Something is missing

Given that we're pretty much all techies here, we're going to find it hard to collectively have conversations through the eyes of the other 98% (?) of humans, who are the ones that matter

Well stated, and hence the importance of anything we can do to bridge that gap. I'm interested in finding ways to reshape programming / software (or at least the ways it is thought of or approached) in human terms. That is, the user mental model shapes the mechanism, and not the other way around. Jim Coplien is a major advocate of this, as you can see in this video: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Reflection-OOP-Social

Invention is not a group process. I can't think of too many symphonies written by a group that came out well. And since the creation of a new language, which is often what is really being attempted in a future of coding project, this group is a wonderful collection of some of the people working on new languages. Some of the projects already have hundreds of users (like the Luna and Red languages), so they don't spend much time here. But for researchers and projects not yet out in the open and actively growing their user base to that critical 1000 user base that is so elusive, this is a great place to be. It takes thousands of hours to start up a new ecosystem, and the more radical and powerful the advance is, the harder it will be, because a major leap will be so disruptive as to invite attacks from traditionalists. Thankfully there are few such people here.