Podd: Future of Coding

Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing (feat. Felienne Hermans)

27 april 2025 | 132 min

A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans

16 februari 2025 | 124 min

In the academic field of programming language research, there are a few prestigious conferences that you must present at to advance in your career. These conferences are rather selective about which presentations they'll accept. If your research work involves proving formal properties about a programming language, you'll have their ear. But if your work looks at, say, the human factors of language design, you might as well not bother applying — and thus, not bother pursuing that work in the first place. Why is the formalistic, systems-focused work elevated, and the human-focused work diminished? And what are the downstream consequences, the self-reinforcing feedback loops that come from this narrow focus?

In this episode we discuss a paper by Felienne Hermans and Ari Schlesinger titled, A case for Feminism in Programming Language Design. It applies the lens of intersectional feminism to reveal a startling lack of "Yes, and…" in academic computer science, where valuable avenues of inquiry are closed off, careers are stifled, and people are unintentionally driven away from contributing to the field, simply because their passions and expertise don't conform to a set of invisible expectations. Through heartbreaking personal anecdotes and extensive supporting references, the paper makes the case that there's a lot of high-value greenfield work to be done, and people who would love to do it — but we will need to collectively identify, understand, and then fix a few broken incentives before it'll happen.

Notes

$ Patreon

Polypad, dubbed the "best piece of education software for smartboards" by published academic Luke Wilson
Or is it Mathigon? "Looks like a nice Desmos", opines enterprise sales expert Ivan Reese.
Market💡Facts.ca
Hedy, a multi-lingual programming environment for the classroom created by Felienne.

Welcome to the TALK BLOC:

Felienne Hermans at Onward! 2024: A case for Feminism in Programming Language Design
Ivan and Alex Warth at LIVE 2024: Inkling
Lu at LIVE 2024: Arroost
Lu at Onward! 2024: Dialogs on Natural Code
Discovering Your Software Umwelt by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Allen Wirfs-Brock, and Jordan Wirfs-Brock
A New Cognitive Perspective on Simplicity in System and Product Design by FoC community member and previous bonus episode guest, Stefan Lesser
Redressing the Balance: A Yin-Yang Perspective on Information Technology by FoC community member Konrad Hinsen
Foremost among the contributions to society by Icebergs are their inspiration of the meme
Alex McLean as in Insane in the Membrane
FOUR FOUR
Mary Shaw, previous guest
Zachtronics make some hard puzzle games.
Define Define, a really great video about that.
Oh, you question toxic masculinity, yet you live within the gender binary?

! Send us email, especially if you're an avid listener who happens to work for a placement agency and knows an AI thought leader who has advised 5000 startups and would be a great fit for our show, share your ideas in the Slack, and:

Eats: Mastodon • Website
Shoots: Mastodon • Website
Leaves: Mastodon • Website

See you in the future!

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/75

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is the Whole Universe a Computer™?

5 januari 2025 | 133 min

Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning

25 augusti 2024 | 164 min

Alexander Repenning created AgentSheets, an environment to help kids develop computational thinking skills. It wrapped an unusual computational model with an even more unusual user interface. The result was divisive. It inspired so many other projects, whilst being rejected at every turn and failing to catch on the way Scratch later did. So in 2017, Repenning published this obit of a paper, Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets, which covers his findings over the years as AgentSheets evolved and transformed, and gives perspective on block-based programming, programming-by-example, agents / rule / rewrite systems, automata, and more.

This is probably the most "normal" episode we've done in a while — we stay close to the text and un-clam many a thought-tickling pearl. I'm saying that sincerely now to throw you off our scent the next time we get totally lost in the weeds. I hear a clock ticking.

Links

$ Do you want to move beyond syntax? Frustrated by a lack of syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic support? Join our Patreon! Choose the tier that best reflects your personal vision of the future of coding. Get (frequently unhinged) monthly bonus content. Most of all: let us know that you enjoy this thing we do, and help us keep doing it for years to come.

Argos, for our non-UK listeners. They were acquired by future TodePond sponsor, Sainsbury's.
Once again, I am asking for your Marcel Goethals makes a lot of cool weird stuff and is a choice follow.
Scratch isn't baby programming. Also, you should try this bizarre game Ivan programmed in 3 blocks of Scratch.
Sandspiel Studio is a delightful block-based sand programming simulator automata environment. Here's a video of Lu and Max introducing it.
Simple Made Easy, a seminal talk by Rich Hickey. Still hits, all these years later.
Someday we'll do an episode on speech acts.
Rewrite rules are one example of rewriting in computing.
Lu's talk —and I quote— "at Cellpond", was actually at SPLASH, about Cellpond, and it's a good talk, about —and I quote— "actually, what if they didn't give up on rewrite rules at this point in history and what if they went further?"
Oh yeah — Cellpond is cool. Here's a video showing you how it works. And here's a video studying how that video works. And here's a secret third thingthat bends into a half-dimension.
Here's Repenning's "rule-bending" paper: Bending the Rules: Steps Toward Semantically Enriched Graphical Rewrite Rules
I don't need to link to SimCity, right? You all know SimCity? Will Wright is, arguably, the #1 name in simulation games. Well, you might not have caught the fantastic article Model Metropolis that unpacks the (inadvertently?) libertarian ideology embodied within the design of its systems. I'd also be remiss not to link to Polygon's video (and the corresponding write-up), which lend a little more colour to the history.
Couldn't find a good link to Blox Pascal, which appears in the paper Towards "Second Generation" Interactive, Graphical Programming Environments by Ephraim P. Glinert, which I also couldn't find a good link to.
Projectional / Structural Editor. Here's a good one.
Baba is You
Vernacular Programmers
Filling Typed Holes with Live GUIs is, AFAIK, the most current canonical reference for livelits.
I'm not linking to Minecraft. But I will link to the Repeater
32 Checkboxes
Wiremod is a… you know what, just watch this.
Chomsky Hierarchy
The Witness
Ivan wrote a colorful Mastodon thread surveying the history of the Connection Machine.
Harder Drive is a must-watch video by the inimitable Tom7.
Also couldn't find a good link for TORTIS. :/
Programming by Example (PbE)
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
Alex Warth, one of the most lovely humans Ivan knows, is a real champion of "this, because that".
Ivan's magnetic field simulations — Magnets! How do they work?
Amit Patel's Red Blob Games, fantastic (fantastic!) explorable explanations that help you study various algorithms and techniques used in game development.
Collaborative diffusion — "This article has multiple issues."
Shaun Lebron, who you might know as the creator of Parinfer, made a game that interactively teaches you how the ghost AI works in Pac-Man. It's fun!
Maxwell's Equations — specifically Gauss's law, which states that magnetic fields are solenoidal, meaning they have zero divergence at all points.
University of Colorado Boulder has a collection of simulations called PhET. They're… mid, at least when compared to building your own simulation. For instance.

Music featured in this episode:

snot bubbles

! Send us email, share your ideas in the Slack, and catch us at these normal places:

Ivan: Mastodon • Website
Jimmy: Mastodon • Website
Lu: Login • Website

See you in the future!

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/073

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pygmalion by David C. Smith

19 juni 2024 | 190 min

Elephant in the Room

21 april 2024 | 176 min

Beyond Efficiency by Dave Ackley

4 mars 2024 | 104 min

Myths & Mythconceptions by Mary Shaw

29 december 2023 | 179 min

Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler

19 november 2023 | 125 min

The subject of this episode's paper — Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler — is one of those grand ideas that makes you want to go stargazing. To stare out into space and just disassociate from your body and become one with the heavens. Everything — life, space, time, existence — all of it is a joke! A cosmic ribbing delivered by the laws of the universe or some higher power or, perhaps, higher order. Humanity waited two thousand years, from the time of the ancient Greeks through until the 1930s, for a means to answer questions of calculability, when three suddenly arrived all at once:

General recursive functions by Gödel in 1934, with functions of sets of natural numbers.
Lambda calculus by Alonzo Church in 1936, with anonymous single-variable functions.
Turing machines by Alan Turing in 1937, with a process for evaluating symbols on a tape.

Then it was discovered that these three models of computation were, in fact, perfectly equivalent. That any statement made in one could be made in the others. A striking coincidence, sure, but not without precedent. But then it was quietly determined (in 1934, again in 1969, and finally published in 1980) that computation itself is in a direct correspondence with logic. That every proposition in a given logic corresponds with a type in a given programming language, every proof corresponds with a program, and the simplification of the proof corresponds with the evaluation of the program.

The implications boggle the mind. How could this be so? Well, how could it be any other way? Why did it take so long to discover? What other discoveries like this are perched on the precipice of revelation?

Philip Wadler is here to walk us through this bit of history, suggest answers to some of these questions, and point us in a direction to search for more.

And we are here, dear listener, to level with you that a lot of this stuff is miserably hard to approach, presented with the symbols and language of formal logic that is so often inscrutable to outsiders. By walking you through Wadler's paper (and the much more approachable Strange Loop talk), and tying it in with the cultural context of modern functional programming, we hope you'll gain an appreciation for this remarkable, divine pun that sits beneath all of computation.

Links

=> patreon.com/futureofcoding — but only if you back the Visual Programming tier!! I'm warning you!

Wadler's Strange Loop talk Propositions as Types
Cocoon is good. It's not, like, Inside or Limbo good, but it's good. Actually, just play Inside. Do that ASAP.
Hollow Knight, also extremely good. Can't wait for Silksong. But seriously, if you're reading this and have haven't played Inside, just skip this episode of the podcast and go play Inside. It's like 3 hours long and it's, like, transformatively great.
Chris Martens has done some cool work (eg) bringing together linear logic and games.
Meh: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
Yeh: Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker
Heh: To Mock a MockingBird by Raymond Smullyan.
The hierarchy of automata
Games: Agency as Art
The Incredible Proof Machine is what some would call a "visual programming language" because proofs are programs. But it's actually really cool and fun to play with. Approach it like a puzzle game, and give it 10 minutes or so to get its hooks into you.
"Stop Doing Logic" is part of the Stop Doing Math meme. Unrelated: Ivan's song Don't Do Math.
Bidirectional Type Checking, a talk by David Christiansen
List Out of Lambda, a blog post by Steve Losh

Nobody noticed that these links were silly last time, so this time I'm drawing more attention to it:

Ivan: Mastodon • Email
Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter

This link is legit:

DM us in the FoC Slack

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/068

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Considered Harmful

29 september 2023 | 105 min

A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi

23 augusti 2023 | 155 min

This community is a big tent. We welcome folks from all backgrounds, and all levels of experience with computers. Heck, on our last episode, we celebrated an article written by someone who is, rounding down, a lawyer! A constant question I ponder is: what's the best way to introduce someone to the world of FoC? If someone is a workaday programmer, or a non-programmer, what can we share with them to help them understand our area of interest?

A personal favourite is the New Media Reader, but it's long and dense. An obvious crowd-pleaser is Inventing on Principle.

Bonnie Nardi's A Small Matter of Programming deserves a place on the list, especially if the reader is already an avid programmer who doesn't yet understand the point of end-user programming. They might ask, "Why should typical computer users bother learning to program?" Well, that's the wrong question! Instead, we should start broader. Why do we use computers? What do we use them to do? What happens when they don't do what we want? Who controls what they do? Will this ever change? What change do we want? Nardi challenges us to explore these questions, and gives the reader a gentle but definitive push in a positive direction.

Next time, we're… considered harmful?

#### $

We have launched a Patreon!

=> patreon.com/futureofcoding

If, with the warmth in your heart and the wind in your wallet, you so choose to support this show then please know that we are tremendously grateful.

Producing this show takes a minor mountain of effort, and while the countless throngs of adoring fair-weather fans will surely arrive eventually, the small kilo-cadre of diehard listeners we've accrued so far makes each new episode a true joy to share. Through thick and thin (mostly thin since the sponsorship landscape turned barren) we're going to keep doing our darnedest to make something thought-provoking with an independent spirit. If that tickles you pink, throw some wood in our fireplace! (Yes, Ivan is writing this, how can you tell?)

Also, it doesn't hurt that the 2nd bonus episode — "Inherently Spatial" — is one of the best episodes of the show yet. It defrags so hard; you'll love it.

#### Init

Bug report: Frog Fractions. Oh the indignity!
Hey, it's The Witness in our show notes again.
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is the better game, even if it spawned Only Up and other copycats that miss the point. The Looker gets the point.
Getting Over It is a triumph that emerged from a genre of games that are hard to play: Octodad, QWOP, I Am Bread
Braid arguably spawned the genre of high-minded & heady puzzlers that all try to say something profound through their design.
Cookie Clicker and Universal Paperclips are good incremental games.
Jump King and Only Up are intentionally bad. Flappy Bird was accidentally good. Surgeon Simulator and Goat Simulator are purely for the laughs. Stanley Parable, like Getting Over It, brings in the voice of the creator to (say) invite rumination on the fourth wall, which is what make them transcendent.
Here's the trailer for Bennett Foddy's new game, Baby Steps.
So on the one hand we have all these "bad" and """bad""" and sometimes badgames, which actually end up doing quite well in advancing the culture. On the other hand we have The Witness, The Talos Principal, Swapper, Antichamber, QUBE, and all these high-minded puzzly games, which despite their best efforts to say something through their design… kinda don't.
When comparing the "interactivity" of these games, it's tempting to talk about the mechanics (or dynamics), but that formal definition feels a little too precise. We mean something looser — something closer to the colloquial meaning when "Gamers" talk about "game mechanics".
Silent Football might be an example of "sports as art". Mao is a card game where explaining the rules is forbidden.

#### Main

The Partially Examined Life is one of Jimmy's favourite philosophy podcasts.
Two essays from Scientific American's 1991 Special Issue Communications, Computers and Networks are referenced in the first chapter, one by Larry Tesler and one by Alan Kay. The other essays in this issue are also quite interesting to reflect on from our position 30 years hence.
Apple's Knowledge Navigator video, and HP's 1995 video, are speculative fiction marketing about conversational agents.
Rewind.ai is one of those "Computer, when did I last degauss the tachyon masticator?" tools. (Oh, Lifestreams…)
S-GPT is Federico Viticci's iOS/Mac Shortcut that strings together ChatGPT and various Shortcuts features, so that you can do some nifty automation stuff via a conversational interface. It feels like similar things could be built — heck, probably already have been built — with "If-Tuh-Tuh-Tuh" or Zapier.
When Ivan reaches for domain-specific terminology, LUT, Arri Alexa, and Redcome easily because, like, he wishes he had occasion to use them.
To hear the story about the Secret Service busting down young Jimmy's door, listen to his episode on the Code With Jason podcast.
C Is Not a Low-level Language — a fantastic article about the illusion that our source code closely matches what actually happens during execution.
What Follows from Empirical Software Research? Not much, according to Jimmy in this delightful article.
Jimmy likes to reference Minecraft's "redstone" which acts a bit like a programming system, so here, have a video about redstone.
Ivan saw this video via Mastodon, about someone making a "real" camera in Blender, and… just… 🤯 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9rEQAGpLw
Jimmy's orchestra struggled with an inappropriately formal approach to Coldplay's Viva La Vida.
Knuth's up-arrow notation

One meaning of "end-user programming" is about allowing people to build their own software. Another is about modifying existing software, and here are two interesting links related to this second meaning:

sprout.place is a lovely website where you decorate a little virtual space together with some remote friends. It's like a MySpace page mashed-up with a Zoom hang, but better.
Geoffrey Litt is a researcher who has tackled both meanings of EUP, but his work on the second meaning is especially interesting. For instance: he worked on Riffle, which explored the consequences of putting the full state of an app inside a reactive database, which is especially interesting if you consider what can be done if this database is available to, rather than hidden from, the end user.
To the best of our recollection, Jonathan Edwards has advocated for "end-programmer programming" as a helpful step toward end-user programming.

Get in touch, ask us questions, please no more mp3s ahh I can still hear the bones yuck:

Ivan: Mastodon • Email
Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter
DM us in the FoC Slack
Support the show on Patreon
lol stands for "lots of love"

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/066

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Interpreting the Rule(s) of Code by Laurence Diver

3 juli 2023 | 182 min

The execution of code, by its very nature, creates the conditions of a "strong legalism" in which you must unquestioningly obey laws produced without your say, invisibly, with no chance for appeal. This is a wild idea; today's essay is packed with them. In drawing parallels between law and computing, it gives us a new skepticism about software and the effect it has on the world. It's also full of challenges and benchmarks and ideas for ways that code can be reimagined. The conclusion of the essay is flush with inspiration, and the references are stellar. So while it might not look it at first, this is one of the most powerful works of FoC we've read: Interpreting the Rule(s) of Code: Performance, Performativity, and Production by Laurence Diver, 2001.

Next episode, we're having an open-ended discussion about end-user programming. The reading is Bonnie Nardi's 1993 classic, A Small Matter of Programming, with the referenced articles from the 1991 Scientific American special issue Communications, Computers and Networks as extra background.

Links

Nova is the new code editor from Panic. Ivan is using it now that his beloved Atom has hit end-of-life.
Ira Glass spoke about The Gap
Ivan's unicorn-puke GUI
Jimmy tried recreating the grainy effect used by The Browser Company's Arc
Chris Granger's Light Table was an early Kickstarter success.
iA Presenter has a clichéd video teaser. Mimestream, a great native Mac client for Gmail, also made one of these. Ivan first saw this style of video over a decade ago with Sparrow — and at least this one has a narrative. Occasionally, someone does a playful tweak on the formula, like this video that keeps getting interrupted for Dark Noise. But in general, this format is worn out, and it was never great to begin with.
Here's the classic Atom 1.0 announcement video
Very Bad Wizards and If Books Could Kill are podcasts that talk through a work from beginning to end sprinkling in reflections as they go, rather than jumping around randomly or separating recap from reflection.
Speech act has a philosophy corner within the philosophy corner. Elephant 2000 by Lisp creator John McCarthy, and Dynamicland, both make use of speech acts.
On The Expressive Power of Programming Languages by Matthias Felleisen
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Black, a reflective Scheme by Kenichi Asai.
Hollow Knight is a great game for a 4-year old, and a 40-year old. It's just a great game. Maybe the greatest? Doom Eternal, not so much — but the inventive soundtrack absolutely slays.
Local-first software
Tony Gilroy's Andor and Terry Gilliam's Brazil. In hindsight, I'm surprised we made it all the way to the final minutes of the show before mentioning Brazil.

Get in touch, ask us questions, DON'T send us the sound of your knuckles cracking:

Ivan: Mastodon • Email
Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter
Join the Future of Coding Slack

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/065

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

INTERCAL by Donald Woods & James Lyon

1 juni 2023 | 114 min

This is a normal episode of a podcast called Future of Coding. We talk about INTERCAL, a real tool for computer programming. [Do I need to say more? Will this sell it? Most people won’t have heard of INTERCAL, but I think the fake out “normal” is enough to draw their attention. Also, I find “computer programming” funny. Not sure why I put that in quotes.]

Links [at least, the ones I remembered to jot down]

The final Strange Loop is coming up this September. Ivan and Jimmy will both be there, though—late breaking news—neither of them will be giving a talk. (“Rocket Rules” apply, if you know what that is.) [Will anyone actually know what “Rocket Rules” is? Will they search for it? That would be sort of embarrassing for me.]
If Ivan were to give a programming talk, getting some flood-contaminated gear from DEC or a PDP-11 to use as staging / set dressing might be a challenge. [Yay, another retread of my personal history. Maybe instead of dredging up my past I should be the sort of person who makes new things, like, ever.]
Meowmeowbeenz [Gah this show hasn’t aged well. At least I’m sticking to the whole “high-brow + low-brow” personal identity by including the reference to it. [Is “meta” low-brow at this point?]]
There’s lots of talk about esolangs (esoteric programming languages), so it’s worth linking the Esolang Wiki. [I worry that we spent too much time focusing on surface syntax. Jimmy tried to get us to talk about the beautifully-weird semantics within INTERCAL, but we never fully went there. I’m sure some people will complain about this lack of depth. Not looking forward to that.]
In particular, Brainfuck, which Jimmy adorably refers to as “BF” because he’s a polite gentleman and Ivan is 2% South Park. [Laughing at my own joke.]
Also, Shakespeare and Shakespeare: vaulting ambition, Out, damned spot, both from the Scottish play (you don’t know where I am, don’t @ me). [Why are these in the show notes? Am I trying to signal some sort of theatre-literacy? Who cares?]
“COMEFROM was eventually implemented in the C-INTERCAL variant of the esoteric programming language INTERCAL” [Considering that this was such a non-element in the original paper, it’s weird that it became such a cornerstone of the episode. “What if we recreated the spirit of the paper in the podcast itself” is a tall order, so I guess we did what we could with what we had. Also, I bet someone is going to object that the paper and language aren’t actually very meta, especially not multiple layers deep, to which I’ll reply: we all bring the flavour of our mouth to the soup we taste.]
Exapunks… Yeah! [Speaking of things that haven’t aged well… woof. I like our newer episodes better. Especially this one. THAT’S JUST BAIT FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WILL COMPLAIN THAT THIS SHOW HAS GONE OFF THE RAILS, PLEASE DO CONTINUE TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW.]
Our tier list was created in tldraw, because it’s the best. [I wish someone applied Steve-and-co’s eye for detail to a visual programming tool. I wish I had time.]
The excellent Advent of Computing podcast did an episode on INTERCAL. (Aside: the AoC website seems a bit busted in non-Chrome browsers, so here’s a backup YouTube link, but you can also just search for Advent of Computing in your podcast player of choice.) [AoC is the exception that proves the rule: there are no high-quality programming podcasts. They all seem so low-effort, made by people who don’t respect the listener’s time and attention. Or they’re aping the high-budget NPR style, with no personality. Also, audio quality is all over the map. Also, just the worst garbage ads and theme music, all of them! I wonder if it’s just a cost-benefit time/energy tradeoff, or maybe people don’t know how to do better? I wonder what we could do to help raise the bar, without opening ourselves up to a bunch of “well I don’t like your podcast either” presumed competitiveness.]
The video Screens in Screens in Screens is fantastic, and the sort of thing that deserves our support. Also, Lu Wilson (the human behind TodePond) has their own programming language that will not be named on podcasts, DreamBerd, which uses the ! to great effect. [Meta-commentary intentionally left blank.]

Some of the music featured in this episode:

All Caps by MF DOOM and Madlib [I don’t even like it when other podcasts include music clips, but then away I go needle-dropping like I’ve got something to prove.]
Various songs from Ivan’s old albums. [I need to update my website. I need to tweak my static site generator. I need to redesign all the CSS. I need to consider putting all my projects into a database so I can generate nicer indexes. I also need to make some new projects — especially music.]

Get in touch, ask us questions, send us the sound of your knuckles cracking:

Ivan: Mastodon • Email [If you don’t have something nice to say, know that I’m very sensitive and nurse wounds for a long time. Also, Nurse With Wound is great.]
Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter [Jimmy doesn’t write these notes so I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I can imagine: a horse galloping in the wind, Jimmy riding shirtless on the horse, Jimmy holding a gigantic tome of philosophical wisdom in one hand, the other outstretched before him, words of revelation flowing from his mouth like honey, “Ivan, the setup to this joke was lame”]
Or just DM us in the FoC Slack. [<3]

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/064

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Out of the Tar Pit by Ben Moseley & Peter Marks

1 april 2023 | 140 min

Out of the Tar Pit is in the grand pantheon of great papers, beloved the world over, with just so much influence. The resurgence of Functional Programming over the past decade owes its very existence to the Tar Pit’s snarling takedown of mutable state, championed by Hickey & The Cloj-Co. Many a budding computational philosophizer — both of yours truly counted among them — have been led onward to the late great Bro86 by this paper’s borrow of his essence and accident. But is the paper actually good? Like, really — is it that good? Does it hold up to the blinding light of hindsight that 2023 offers? Is this episode actually an April Fools joke, or is it a serious episode that Ivan just delayed by a few weeks because of life circumstances and his own incoherent sense of humour? I can’t tell.

Apologies in advance. Next time, we’re going back to our usual format to discuss Intercal.

Links

Before anything else, we need to link to Simple Made Easy. If you don’t know, now you know! It’s a talk by Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) that, as best as I can tell, widely popularized discussion of simplicity and complexity in programming, using Hickey’s own definitions that built upon the Tar Pit paper. Ignited by this talk, with flames fanned by a few others, as functional programming flared in popularity through the 2010s, the words “simple”, “easy”, “complex”, and “reason about” became absolutely raging memes.
We also frequently reference Fred Brooks and his No Silver Bullet. Our previous episode has you covered.
The two great languages of the early internet era: Perl & TcL
For more on Ivan’s “BLTC paradise-engineering wombat chocolate”, see our episode on Augmenting Human Intellect, if you dare.
For more on Jimmy’s “Satoshi”, see Satoshi Nakamoto, of course.
And for Anonymous, go on.
Enemy of the State — This film slaps.
“Some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and state.” — Guy Steele
“my tempo”
FoC Challenge: Brooks claimed 4 evils lay at the heart of programming — Complexity, Conformity, Changeability, and Invisibility. Could you design a programming that had a different set of four evils at the heart of it? (Bonus: one of which could encompass the others and become the ur-evil)
The paper introduces something called Functional Relational Programming, abbreviated FRP. Note well, and do not be confused, that there is a much more important and common term that also abbreviates to FRP: Family Resource Program. Slightly less common, but yet more important and relevant to our interests as computer scientists, is the Fluorescence Recovery Protein in cyanobacteria. Less abundant, but again more relevant, is Fantasy Role-Playing, a technology with which we’ve all surely developed a high degree of expertise. For fans of international standards, see ISO 639-3 — the Franco-Provençal language, represented by language code frp. As we approach the finality of this paragraph, I’ll crucially point out that “FRP”, when spoken aloud all at once at though it were a word, sounds quite like the word frp, which isn’t actually a word — you’ve fallen right into my trap. Least importantly of all, and also most obscurely, and with only minor interest or relevance to listeners of the podcast and readers of this paragraph, we have the Functional Reactive Programming paradigm originally coined by Conor Oberst and then coopted by rapscallions who waste time down by the pier playing marbles.
FoC Challenge: Can you come up with a programming where informal reasoning doesn’t help? Where you are lost, you are without hope, and you need to get some kind of help other than reasoning to get through it?
Linear B
LinearB
Intercal
Esolangs
FoC Challenge: Can you come up with a kind of testing where using a particular set of inputs does tell you something about the system/component when it is given a different set of inputs?

It was not Epimenides who said “You can’t dip your little toesies into the same stream” two times — presumably because he only said it once.
Zig has a nicely explicit approach to memory allocation.
FoC Challenge: A programming where more things are explicit — building on the example of Zig’s explicit allocators.
Non-ergonomic, Non-von Neumann, Nonagon Infinity
One of Ivan’s favourite musical acts of the 00s is the ever-shapeshifting Animal Collective — of course 🙄. If you’ve never heard of them, the best album to start with is probably the avant-pop Feels, though their near-breakthrough was the loop-centric Merriweather Post Pavilion, and Ivan’s personal favourite is, as of this writing, the tender psychedelic folk of Prospect Hummer.

Jimmy’s Philosophy Corner

To learn more about possible worlds (“not all possibilities are possible”), take a look at the SEP articles on Possible Worlds, Modal Logic, Varieties of Modality, and the book Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke.
For more on abstract objects (“do programs exist? do numbers exist?”), see the SEPs on Platonism in Metaphysics, Nominalism in Metaphysics, and the paper titled A Theory of Properties by Peter van Inwagen.

Music featured in this episode:

Jimmy’s Philosophy Corner got a new stinger. No link, sorry. Why does this feel like a changelog?

Get in touch, ask us questions, send us old family recipes:

Ivan: Mastodon • Email
Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter
Or just DM us in the FoC Slack.

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/063

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks

11 februari 2023 | 180 min

Jimmy and I have each read this paper a handful of times, and each time our impressions have flip-flopped between "hate it so much" and "damn that's good". There really are two sides to this one. Two reads, both fair, both worth discussing: one of them within "the frame", and one of them outside "the frame". So given that larger-than-normal surface for discursive traversal, it's no surprise that this episode is, just, like, intimidatingly long. This one is so, so long, friends. See these withered muscles and pale skin? That's how much time I spent in Ableton Live this month. I just want to see my family.

No matter how you feel about Brooks, our thorough deconstruction down to the nuts and bolts of this seminal classic will leave you holding a ziplock bag full of cool air and wondering to yourself, "Wait, this is philosophy? And this is the future we were promised? Well, I guess I'd better go program a computer now before it's too late and I never exist."

For the next episode, we're reading a fish wearing a bathrobe.

Sorry, it's late and I'm sick, and I have to write something, you know?

Links:

Fred Brooks also wrote the Mythical Man-Month, which we considered also discussing on this episode but thank goodness we didn't.
Also, Fred Brooks passed away recently. We didn't mention it on the show, but it's worth remarking upon. RIP, and thanks for fighting the good fight, Fred. I still think you're wrong about spatial programming, but Jimmy agrees with you, so you can probably rest easy since between the two of us he's definitely the more in touch with the meaning of life.
The Oxide and Friends podcast recorded an episode of predictions.
Jimmy’s Aphantasia motivates some of his desire for FoC tools.
Don’t miss the previous episode on Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building, since Ivan references it whilst digging his own grave.
Jimmy uses Muse for his notes, so he can highlight important things in two colors — yes, two colors at the same time. Living in the future.
For the Shadow of the Colossus link, here’s an incredible speedrun of the game. Skip to 10:20-ish for a great programming is like standing on the shoulders of a trembling giant moment.
Mu is a project by Kartik Agaram, in which he strips computing down to the studs and rebuilds it with a more intentional design. “Running the code you want to run, and nothing else.”
“Is it a good-bad movie, a bad-bad movie, or a movie you kinda liked?”
Ivan did some research. Really wish Marco and Casey didn't let him.
Jimmy did an attack action so as to be rid of Brook’s awful invisibility nonsense. Awful.
As promised, here’s a link in the show notes to something something Brian Cantrill, Moore’s Law, Bryan Adams, something something.
Dynamicland, baby!
Here’s just one example of the racist, sexist results that current AI tools produce when you train them on the internet. Garbage in, garbage out — a real tar pit. AI tools aren’t for deciding what to say; at best, they’ll help with how to say it.
Gray Crawford is one of the first people I saw posting ML prompts what feels like an eternity ago, back when the results all looked like blurry goop but like… blurry goop with potential.
Not sure of a good link for Jimmy’s reference that Age of Empires II used expert systems for the AI, but here’s a video that talks about the AI in the game and even shows some Lisp code.
Idris is a language that has a bit of an “automatic programming” feel.
The visual programming that shall not be named.
When people started putting massive numbers of transistors into a single chip (eg: CPU, RAM, etc) they called that process Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). Also, remember that scene in the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire when the hunky Steve Jobs-looking guy said "VLSI" to impress the girl from the only good episode of Black Mirror? I'm still cringing.
Sally Haslanger is a modern day philosopher and feminist who works with accident and essence despite their problematic past.

Music featured in this episode:

Never, a song I wrote and recorded on Tuesday after finally cleaning my disgusting wind organ. It was like Hollow Knight in there.

Get in touch, ask us questions, send us old family recipes:

Ivan: Mastodon • Email
Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter
Or just DM us in the FoC Slack.

futureofcoding.org/episodes/062

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur

6 januari 2023 | 115 min

Magic Ink by Bret Victor

8 december 2022 | 140 min

Before the time-travelling talks, the programmable rooms, the ladders and rocket launchers, we had the first real Bret Victor essay: Magic Ink. It set the stage for Bret's later explorations, breaking down the very idea of "software" into a few key pieces and interrogating them with his distinct focus, then clearly demoing a way we could all just do it better. All of Bret's works feel simultaneously like an anguished cry and a call to arms, and this essay is no exception.

For the next episode, we're reading Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur, with a little bit of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind thrown in for good measure.

Links

Four Hundred of the most Chart-Topping Thoughts of All Time:

Paper Programs by JP Posma was inspired by Dynamicland.

"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." from Halt and Catch Fire

Charticulator is Microsoft Research's take on a _Drawing Dynamic Visualizations_-esq tool.

Jimmy's Fender Jazz bass looks like this, but red, but like a decade older, but like $600 at the time.

We could probably post parts of this episode as Boyfriend Roleplay on YouTube.

Fitts's Law is but one thing we've learned about the industrial design aspect of building good software.

The Witness is a game where communicating ideas through (essentially) graphic design is the whole entire point of the game. If you haven't played it, know that it comes highly recommended by plenty of folks in the community.

A "red letter Bible" is a Bible in which the words spoken by Jesus are colored red, to make them easier to identify.

Toph Tucker has a pretty cool personal website. It's rare to see these sorts of sites nowadays, and they're always made by adventuresome programmers, trendy design agencies, or their clients. In the Flash era, it felt like everyone had a website like this, for better and for worse.

tldraw is a beautiful little browser-based drawing tool by Steve Ruiz. What few things it does, it does exceptionally well.

John while Henry had had had had had had had had had been my preference.

#devlog-together is the channel on our Future of Coding slack community where members post small, frequent updates about what they're working on.

The (Not Boring) apps are arguably a counterpoint to Bret's theses about information apps and harmful interaction, where the interaction and graphic design are balanced against being maximally-informative, toward being silly and superfluous, to great effect.

Did you know there's a hobby horse, but also a hobby horse? I didn't!

There are a few examples of folks doing FoC work that, in Ivan's view, align well with the values Bret outlines in Magic Ink:

Szymon Kaliski's projects for Ink & Switch, summarized in his Strange Loop talk, Programmable Ink.
Mock Mechanics is an environment for building mechanisms by Felipe Reigosa.
PANE by Josh Horowitz inverts the usual node-wire programming pattern by putting data in the nodes and data transformation in the wires.

Robot Odyssey was a 1984 game for the Apple II (and some other, lesser systems) in which players would go inside various robots to reprogram them.

Music featured in this episode:

Wash Machine, from the unfinished 2014 album Sneaky Dances
Shaun's Amaj Rebirth, created in November 2022 for a friend named — you guessed it — Shaun.

Hey! Send us questions we can answer on the show. Like, "How do you keep bread warm?" Or, "What's so great about concatenative languages?" We'll answer them. Send them here:

Jimmy
Ivan
Or just DM one of us in the FoC Slack.

futureofcoding.org/episodes/060

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel

30 oktober 2022 | 73 min

Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel

20 september 2022 | 118 min

Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg

18 juli 2022 | 165 min

Augmenting Human Intellect by Doug Engelbart

6 juni 2022 | 132 min

Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklider

12 april 2022 | 143 min

Ella Hoeppner: Vlojure

5 januari 2022 | 76 min

Scott Anderson: End-user Programming in VR

7 november 2021 | 123 min

Amjad Masad: Replit

27 augusti 2021 | 121 min

Toby Schachman: Cuttle, Apparatus, and Recursive Drawing

21 juli 2021 | 114 min

Mary Rose Cook: Isla & Code Lauren

4 juni 2021 | 135 min

Ravi Chugh: Sketch-n-Sketch

9 mars 2021 | 138 min

Jennifer Jacobs: Para & Dynamic Brushes

14 juni 2020 | 113 min

Max/MSP & Pure Data: Miller Puckette

12 maj 2020 | 70 min

Miller Puckette created "The Patcher" Max (the precursor to Max/MSP), and later Pure Data, two of the most important tools in the history of visual programming and computer music. Max was designed by Miller in the mid-1980s as an aid to computer-music composers who wanted to build their own dynamic systems without needing write C code. Max had no facility for sound generation at first, but that would come eventually with the addition of MSP. A decade later, after some academic politics nonsense forced him away from Max, Miller went on to create its successor, the open source Pure Data. Both Max/MSP and Pure Data have become wildly popular, with Max/MSP as a more polished-looking commercial product developed by Cycling '74 (now owned by music behemoth Ableton), and Pure Data as the thriving independent community project of hackers and techno-punks. Node-and-wire visual programming languages are almost a cliche at this point, as the vast majority of them either borrow heavily or at least reference the visual design of Miller Puckette's original Max patcher and its MSP/Pd offspring. Though as you'll hear in the interview, many of them are poorer for not rethinking some of the underling assumptions of their inspiration.

I decided to bring Miller on the show after hearing a fabulous interview of him by Darwin Grosse on the Art + Music + Technology podcast. (Tip: subscribe, it's good.) Miller gave a great retelling of the history of Max and Pure Data and the forces at play when he created them, and that episode is a tidy complement the more design-focussed interview here on our show. Miller mentioned in passing that one of the three books he has yet to write would be his thoughts on realtime scheduling, so that was the initial hook for my interview. Looking back on the 30+ years of Max/Pd history, what has he learned about the design of tools? What were the alternative ideas that he didn't pursue? Where is there room for improvement, perhaps by others picking up where he left off?

In this interview, Miller said a handful of things that were, well, painful for me to hear as a dogmatic champion of visual programming. So if you come into this thinking it'll be a well-earned hour of congratulation and adoration, sit up and get ready to flip the dang table. This interview was a blast; on a personal level, I was thrilled to have the chance to talk to such an influential figure in the history of my field, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Quote of the Show: "It's not only powerful, but it's also inadequate."

The transcript for this episode was sponsored by Repl.it. For the full transcript and links go to https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/047

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

2020 Community Survey

25 april 2020 | 64 min

Orca: Devine Lu Linvega

1 mars 2020 | 94 min

Orca is a visual programming environment for making music. Except it's not graphical, it's just text arranged in a grid. Except it doesn't actually make music, it just silently emits digital events across time. When you first see it, it's utterly alien. When you start to learn how it works and why, the logic of it all snaps into place, and it becomes a thrilling case study for authors of live programming environments and interactive media tools.

Devine Lu Linvega, Orca's creator, struck a wonderful balance between flashy style and significant utility. Orca is typically encountered as an inky black and seafoam green alphabet soup, pulsating to some species of broody electronic industrial throb. But it is also a forgiving learning environment that doesn't crash, puts code and data together in the same space, lets you directly manipulate code and data interchangeably, allows generous recovery from mistakes, and supports discovery through freeform play.

I invited Devine to come on the show specifically to brain dump about the design process of Orca, how he started the project and built it up to what it is today. During our three-hour conversation we wound up talking a lot about all the other tools he's created, and you can hear that discussion on last month's episode. This time it's all Orca — inspirations, execution model, operators, interface, system design, ports & reimplementations, interactions with other tools, and the community.

This episode contains many snippets of music, as examples of what you can make using Orca. All of it was created by Devine, and is available on his Youtube channel. If you like a particular piece and want to hear the full thing — and see exactly how Devine made it — they are all linked in the transcript at the point that they appear in the show. So just scroll and skim, or search the transcript for some phrase that neighbours the song you want to find.

Quote of the show: "It's for children. The documentation fits in a tweet, basically."

Links

Devine Lu Linvega is our guest. He and his partner Rekka funnel their lives and creativity into Hundred Rabbits. Devine has created countless tools, but Orca is the focus of today's episode. He also appeared on the previous episode. Support them on Patreon, so they can keep making amazing things like Orca.

At the dawn of time, Devine was inspired to make a game by misunderstanding an Autechre music video. I don't know which one he meant, but here's a classic. And, why not, here's my favourite song of theirs. Yes, that's one song. Put on some big headphones and play it loud while you read, debug, sleep, drive, trip, what have you.

In the theme of creation through misunderstanding, Orca was inspired by a misunderstanding of Tidal.

It's not mentioned in the episode, but I wanted to link to this Tidal remix (By Lil Data, aka FoC community member Jack Armitage) of a song by Charli XCX. This remix slaps, but... you can't really feel what the music is going to do based on the code, hey?

Rami Ismail hosted a year long game jam, for which Devine and a friend created a little block-based puzzle game named Pico, which would eventually become Orca.

Sam Aaron created the music coding tool Sonic Pi, which is included by default with Raspbian. It reminded Devine a little bit of Processing without the compile time, and seemed similar to Xcode's Playgrounds.

Dwarf Fortress, ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery), and other Roguelike games are precursors to the 2D character grid of Orca. The code structures you create resemble the patterns in Game of Life.

Learning how to read Orca code is like learning to read the code in The Matrix.

Orca's traveling N E S W operators are likened to Rube Goldberg machines, rolling ball sculptures, and the Incredible Machine.

Orca is a language that uses "bangs", a concept borrowed from Max/MSP and Pure Data. Devine also made a similar looking flow-based web framework called Riven.

Generative music arguably went mainstream with In C by Terry Riley. Here is the definitive recording, and here is one of my favourite renditions. While you can make generative music with Max/MSP, or Ableton Live, Orca offers a much richer, easier approach.

The Chrome version of Orca is easy to get up and running with no dependencies, thanks to web platform features like WebMIDI and WebAudio— much easier than tools like Tidal or Extempore, especially if you use Orca's companion synthesizer app Pilot.

Orca is so simple that it's been ported to Lua and C. The C version runs nicely on the Norns, which is a little sound computer by Monome.

Ivan recently listened to a fantastic interview with Miller Puckette (creator of Max and Pure Data), which sparked curiosity about realtime scheduling for live-coded music tools.

Orca's Euclid operator U was inspired by the Euclidean Circles synth module.

The community around Orca largely grew out of the "lines" community, a forum started by Monome. They make a lot of pieces you can use as part of a modular synthesizer rig — you know, one of those giant cabled monsters used by the likes of Tangerine Dream in the 70s. People still do that, and it's better than ever.

It seems like all node-and-wire visual programming languages, like Origamiand Node-RED, are perpetuating certain conventions borrowed from modular synthesis without any awareness of that history and the limitations it imposes. This makes your humble host a touch grumpy.

The THX deep note was an early example of the wild polyphony afforded by computer-synthesized audio, as opposed to the limited polyphony or even monophony of analog synthesizers.

You can use Orca to control Unity, which is neat. You can use it to play QWOP, which is nuts. Speaking of QWOP, it's part of a whole genre of hard-to-control games like Surgeon Simulator, Octodad, I Am Bread.

Devine has used Kdenlive and Blender to edit videos, since they're both really good (for an open source programs). Better than editing just with FFmpeg.

Remember when Jack Rusher said "Orcal"? Yeah, good times.

The transcript for this episode was sponsored by Repl.it. They're amazing, and seeing stories like this just melts my heart. Email jobs@repl.it if you'd like to work on the future of coding and, hey, help kids discover the joy of computing. For the full transcript go to https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045#full-transcript

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Making Your Own Tools: Devine Lu Linvega

4 februari 2020 | 56 min

We live in a world that is gradually becoming more closed off, more controlled, more regional. Our relationship with technology is now primarily one of consumption, buying new hardware on a regular cycle, using software conceptualized to meet a market need and fulfill promises made to venture capitalists. It's common to hear people talk about both computing hardware and software as though they were appliances, not meant to be user-serviced, not meant to be modified. The tools we use are being designed for the 80% who live in a city, use grid electricity, want to keep up with the industry, and have an unacknowledged learned helplessness about the limitations of their tools.

Devine Lu Linvega and his partner Rekka live on a sailboat. He makes art, music, software, and other cultural artifacts. When Photoshop's DRM required that he maintain a connection to the internet, he wrote his own creative suite. When his MacBook died in the middle of the ocean, he switched to Linux with hardware he could service. His electricity comes from solar panels, and every joule counts — so that's out with Chrome and Electron and in with Scheme, C, assembly, and maybe someday Forth.

I wanted to interview Devine with a main focus on just one of the dozens of tools he's created over the past few years — Orca, a spatial programming environment for generating synchronized realtime events. It's ostensibly a tool for music, but has been applied to all sorts of other disciplines in wildly creative ways. Devine and I ended up talking for over three hours, and after editing out everything superfluous there was still too much matter for just one episode. So we're going to take this in two pieces. Today, you'll hear the bits of our conversation that covered everything other than Orca — Devine's philosophy, the stories of his other tools, the ways in which boat life have forced certain technology choices on him. On the next episode we'll have the rest — a deep dive into Orca, covering the thinking and story behind the design of the tool, the community that has picked it up and run with it in all sorts of wild directions, and lots of little nooks and crannies in the space around this fascinating project.

My hope is that the topics discussed today will let you see from Devine's perspective, so that when we look at Orca in detail you can appreciate exactly why it is the way it is, and take away valuable lessons for your own projects.

Given that his most recent explorations have been making art and programming tools that run on the NES, the best quote of the show has to be: "I never want to have a stronger computer than the one I have today."

Links

Devine Lu Linvega is our guest. He and his partner Rekka funnel their lives and creativity into Hundred Rabbits. Devine has created countless tools, but Orca, Ronin, Left, Dotgrid, the 1-bit drawing tool Noodle and it's 3D scene layout tool Poodle are particularly fascinating. His website is like a wiki, a time tracking tool, and an alternate universe.

Devine released a series of beautiful illustrations for Inktober.

Repl.it is our Sponsor. Email jobs@repl.it if you'd like to work on the future of coding.

Folks interested in energy-efficient spatial programming should watch this Strange Loop talk by Chuck Moore about the Forth programming language.

Potentially similar projects include Inferno and ChrysaLisp.

The resilient, living systems of Dave Ackley are also fascinating.

The transcript for this episode was sponsored by Repl.it and can be found at https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044#full-transcript

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Unveiling Dark: Ellen Chisa & Paul Biggar

25 september 2019 | 147 min

Last Monday, Ellen Chisa and Paul Biggar unveiled Dark, a new web-based programming environment for creating backend web services. In these conversations, first with Ellen and then with Paul, we discuss how they met, conceived of the idea, iterated on the product, and what their long-term vision is for the product.

Dark is a web-based, structured editor with a data store built-in. It's code has a functional programming feel to it, but it also embraces what they call "functional/imperative". For example, their "error rail" allows programmers to defer handling nil-cases, much like a dynamically-typed language, but still keeps track of their existence in a monadic structure, like a statically-typed language, but without users having to learn anything about monads!

Paul often brings the discussion of Dark back to Fred Brook's distinction in _No Silver Bullet_ between essential and accidental complexity. I had fun in this interview diving into the Aristotelian roots of that distinction. We also debated the meaning of the terms "no-code" and "low-code", and whether either could be applied to Dark.

Dark removes accidental complexity around infrastructure and deployment. There is no separate step to deploy code in Dark. It's "deployless". Every single change to a Dark codebase is instantly (in 50ms, the time it takes to get your incremental change to the server) deployed to production servers. Of course this doesn't mean that every change you make is instantly deployed to _users_, but simply put on production servers behind a feature flag _ready_ to be rolled out at your discretion. Deployment, getting code running locally to run in production, is eliminated because all code is running on Dark's platform at all times. What remains is simply choosing when to release that code to users.

One of my favorite parts of Dark is how readable its editor makes functional programming, which I typically find intimidating and difficult to parse. The Dark editor saves all past HTTP requests to all routes, and then uses those values to provide "live data" for every intermediate expression in that route. A dense section of code becomes totally comprehensible by clicking through each expression and seeing actual past values that have inhabited that expression. It combines of the best parts of a debugger and sprinkled console.log statements, but without the downsides of either.

I'm glad that we had the opportunity in this conversation to dwell on some of the trade-offs of using Dark. Paul and Ellen are well aware of the risks customers face by moving their applications onto the Dark platform, and hope to alleviate those risks as much as possible. For example, they are looking into creating a legal structure that will make Dark open-source in the event that Dark shuts down.

Paul Biggar is best-known in the Valley for co-founding CircleCI, a tool for continuous integration and deployment. At heart, he's a compilers nerd: he got a PhD in compilers, worked on the JavaScript compiler at Mozilla, built CircleCI which is a compiler for deployment, and is now building Dark, a programming language, environment, and infrastructure compiler.

Ellen Chisa is passionate about helping people make things. She worked at Microsoft on Office Mobile, at Kickstarter, and started a company that built tools for travel agents, Lola.

The full transcript for this episode was sponsored by repl.it and can be found at: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/043#full-transcript

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Blurring the Line Between User and Programmer: Lane Shackleton

15 augusti 2019 | 101 min

"The world's been divided into people who can make software, and the people who use software all day, and basically we think that that paradigm is not a good one. It feels kind of broken," says Lane Shackleton, Head of Product at Coda, where they are building a new kind of document that blurs the line between users and programmers.

A Coda document starts out looking like a familiar online document, a lot like Google Docs. There's a blinking cursor, you can bold and italicize text, add images, and collaboratively edit it alongside others. But a Coda table is much more powerful than a traditional table that you'd find in a typical word processor. Like a spreadsheet, the a Coda table allows you to create complex relationship between pieces of data via a formula language. Upon closer examination, the Coda table is more structured than spreadsheets and more closely resembles a friendly relational database, like Airtable.

If you're familiar with Notion, another augmented document medium, this all may sound familiar. Coda differentiates itself in a few ways. For one, it allows users to build complex (but no-code) trigger-based workflows from within the tool, such as when a table is modified or a button is pressed. For another, Coda really sells itself as an app-builder, in that teams can use Coda documents on their phones as native mobile apps. For example, a bike shop can have its employees easily swipe and snap a photo of inventory directly into a Coda table simply by creating a photo column in that table. Coda takes care of converting that column into an interface that automatically pulls up the camera on mobile.

Coda was inspired by the founders' experience at YouTube, where the company "ran on spreadsheets," but now they dream of building a medium that fundamentally changes how people see themselves, as creators instead of merely as consumers, and reshapes the way teams, communities, and even families collaborate and function. It's a big vision, and Coda has a long way to go.

This episode was sponsored by Replit. The transcript can be found here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/041#transcript

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

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The Aesthetics of Programming Tools: Jack Rusher

26 juli 2019 | 101 min

Ivan Reese guest hosts.

I've been intimidated by Jack Rusher from the first blush. I mean, he's wearing a high-collared fur coat and black sunglasses in his Twitter pic, and his bio includes "Bell Labs Researcher". So when tasked with choosing a subject for my first interview, I immediately reached out to him, leaning in to my nervousness. His reply included the detail that he's "generally hostile to the form" of podcasting. Terrifying.

When we talked, it was about Lisp — several flavours of Scheme and Racket, Common Lisp, Lisp machines, Black, Clojure, parens of all stripes. It was also about aesthetics, and graphic design, the relative ignorance of typical programming tools to the capability of the visual cortex, and how to better tap it. This podcast's streak of discussions about Coq, miniKanren, TLA+, and Alloy continues, with the addition of QuickCheck and the like. Jack presents his work on a literate editor for Clojure called Maria.cloud, an environment that makes a number of unusual and interesting choices both in the design and implementation, reaching for an ideal blend of features that afford both instant beginner enthusiasm and unrestricted expert use. We pay our respects to the phenomenal red carpet that video games roll out to new players, inviting them in to the model and mechanics of the game with an apparent ease and apt ability that should be the envy of programming toolsmiths like us. The show ends with Jack sharing an excellent collection of plugs, ranging from academic papers by the relatively obscure Stéphane Conversy, to the aesthetically-lush programming tools pouring out of Hundredrabbits's Devine Lu Linvega.

I am no longer terrified of Jack's persona. Rather, I am now humbled by his towering expertise and the wildly varied accomplishments of his career, and it was a thrill to get to tour them in this interview. Best quote of the show: "A kind of grotesque capitulation to sameness." Damn, Jack!

Links

Jack Rusher is our esteemed guest. He is on Twitter, Instagram, and SoundCloud. Applied Science is his consultancy, and Maria.cloud is their beautifully designed literate Clojure editor.

Ivan Reese hosts. He's on Twitter, works on educational media, is making a visual programming tool, and plays 100 instruments — badly. He started life with HyperCard and now loves Max/MSP.

Repl.it is our Sponsor. Email jobs@repl.it if you'd like to work on the future of coding.

Complex Event Processing is a bit of technology Jack helped commercialize.

ClojureVerse is where a discussion of Luna led to the Visual Programming Codex, based on the History of Lisp Parens by Shaun Lebron.

QuickCheck, miniKanren, Datalog, Black Scheme, and Oleg Kiselyov are touched on. Out of the Tar Pit has its mandatory mention, and then Chez Scheme saves the day.

I wanted to link to the Maru project but the author, Ian Piumata's website seems to be down and I could find no other canonical reference. There's some discussion on Hacker News and such. If you know of a good link, I'd love a PR.

Scheme Bricks and Media Molecule's Dreams are interesting touchstones on the road to future visual programming languages. Ivan has an affinity for Pure Data and Max/MSP and vvvv.

When talking about tools for beginners versus experts, Rich Hickey's Design, Composition, and Performance is invoked — and poor Shostakovich.

Jack's main is Maria.cloud, named in honour of Maria Montessori. SICP gets a nod. Maria has proven useful at Clojure Bridge. Matt Hubert [Twitter] created the Cells abstraction that Maria was eventually built atop — it's similar to ObservableHQ.

Video games like Steel Battalion, The Witness, and Dead Space have strong opinions about how much, or how little, visual interface to expose to the player. Complex 3D tools like Maya and 3D Studio Max are GUI inspirations for Ivan, where Jack and Matt prefer simplicity, so much so that Matt wrote When I Sit Down At My Editor, I Feel Relaxed. Dave Liepmann is the third leg of the stool in Applied Science, Jack's consultancy.

Maria originally had a deployment feature like Glitch. There's a great talk about Maria by the Applied Science trio, containing a mini-talk called Maria for experts by Jack.

Pharo is an inspiring modern Smalltalk.

Fructure is a wildly cool new structured editor, and its designer Andrew Blinn is fantastic on Twitter.

Extempore and Temporal Recursion by Andrew Sorensen offer some interesting foundations for future visual programming tools.

Sonic Pi and Overtone are lovely audio tools by Sam Aaron, widely praised and deservedly so, and everyone should back Sam's Patreon.

A visual perception account of programming languages: finding the natural science in the art and Unifying Textual and Visual: A Theoretical Account of the Visual Perception of Programming Languages are obscure but beautiful papers by Stéphane Conversy.

Aesthetic Programming is one of Ivan's favourites, and the author Paul Fishwick just so happened to teach Jack's graphics programming class at Uni.

Orca is a mind-bending textual-visual-musical hybrid programming tool by Hundredrabbits, who are Devine Lu Linvega and Rekka Bell. Notwithstanding that they live on a sailboat(!), they do an amazing job of presenting their work and everyone in our community should take stock of how they accomplish that.

Ableton Push and Ableton Live are practically state-issued music tools in Berlin. (Not to mention — Ivan edited this podcast in Live, natch.)

thi.ng and @thi.ng/umbrella are Jurassic-scale libraries by Karsten Schmidt, who wrote blog posts about Clojure's Reducers in TypeScript.

Finally, Nextjournal are doing great work with their multi-lingual online scientific notebook environment.

The transcript for this episode was sponsored by Repl.it and can be found at https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/041#full-transcript

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joining Logic, Relational, and Functional Programming: Michael Arntzenius

13 juni 2019 | 113 min

Mathematical Foundations for the Activity of Programming: Cyrus Omar

7 juni 2019 | 133 min

The Case for Formal Methods: Hillel Wayne

11 april 2019 | 94 min

De-Nerding Programming: Jonathan Edwards

2 mars 2019 | 108 min

Moldable Development: Tudor Girba

13 februari 2019 | 172 min

Democratizing Web Design: Vlad Magdalin

6 januari 2019 | 93 min

The Edges of Representation: Katherine Ye

5 december 2018 | 74 min

Reflection 14: /about

3 december 2018 | 112 min

If you haven’t been following my research journey, this episode is a great place to join! I recap of who I am, where I come from, what I’m trying to accomplish, and how I hope to accomplish it.

The mission of this project is, broadly, to “democratize” programming. My new phrase is:

Enable all people to modify they software they use in the course of using it.

This mission would cause the following changes, in order of increasing importance:

All software will be co-created by decentralized communities, rather than centralized groups or companies.
Through the power of crowd-sourcing, the quality of all software will become much higher than existing software.
All software will be much more composible, interoperable with other pieces of software.
All software will be arbitrarily customizable, allowing for bespoke, tailored experiences.
Learning to communicate with computers teaches one how to think more clearly, precisely, mathmatically, and powerfully. If one can manipulate the software one uses, if only one learns how to organize one’s thoughts, many people will self-teach themselvse to do just that.
As the fabric of the world is eaten by software, the ability to fully manipulate that software one uses is an essential freedom.

This vision is not new nor creative: it’s obvious that people would change things if they could. Yet this problem has proven stubborn over the decades and most have given it up as insoluble. We have all but forgotten the essential characteristic of computers: their malleability.

In order to accomplish this vision, I believe there are three large categories of problems that need to be addressed:

Rid ourselves of the IO Monad, replacing it with better abstractions for whole systems.
Create a better programming experience for the complex abstractions we create to avoid IO.
Reimagine version control for a world where software looks very different than it does today, with many more forks, at many more levels than just one-deep off of master

My recent work was on ridding ourselves of the IO Monad from user interfaces, which is building on Conal Elliot’s FRP work. My paper and talk at REBLS last month argues that Elm Architecture makes software take longer to understand (which is untenable if we want people to be able to modify the software they use in the course of using it) as compared to the higher-order and cyclic streams of Conal’s original FRP.

My future work will be improving the programming experience of “original FRP”, potentially with a Haskell-inspired structured editor. I will also extend Conal’s FRP work to also removing the IO Monad from the “backend”.

In the episode I add a lot more color to these points, as well as discuss my personal background, the past and future of Future of Coding meetups, my experience at SPLASH last month, and other whacky ideas!

You can see the transcript for this episode at https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/33.

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Basic Developer Human Rights: Quinn Slack

24 oktober 2018 | 79 min

Sustaining the Underfunded: Nadia Eghbal

12 oktober 2018 | 89 min

On The Maintenance Of Large Software: James Koppel

22 september 2018 | 96 min

Reflection Thirteen - Independent mentorship

27 augusti 2018 | 65 min

Exploring Dynamicland - Omar Rizwan

27 augusti 2018 | 86 min

Bringing Explicit Modeling To The Web: David K Piano

17 juli 2018 | 72 min

Compassion & Programming: Glen Chiacchieri

3 juli 2018 | 112 min

You Should Consider Some States Kevin Lynagh

12 juni 2018 | 101 min

Stop Being A Sysadmin For Your Own Machine: Nick Santos

22 maj 2018 | 58 min

Teaching Abstraction: Brent Yorgey

17 maj 2018 | 77 min

Learning Programming At Scale: Philip Guo

2 maj 2018 | 71 min

Building for Developers: Aidan Cunniffe

1 februari 2018 | 84 min

Coding On (the) Beach: Jason Brennan

29 december 2017 | 98 min

Building Universe: Joe Cohen

13 december 2017 | 84 min

Research Recap Nine: Constructing My Crusade

4 december 2017 | 21 min

Bootstrapping Bubble.is: Emmanuel Straschnov

28 november 2017 | 44 min

Research Recap Eight: Life & Work Planning

6 november 2017 | 48 min

Raising Genius with Scott Mueller

17 oktober 2017 | 97 min

Research Recap Seven - Master Planning

9 oktober 2017 | 71 min

Teaching Elm To 4th Graders: Christopher Anand

3 oktober 2017 | 61 min

Research Recap Six: CycleJS Deep Dive

25 september 2017 | 29 min

How ReactJS was created - with Pete Hunt

19 september 2017 | 74 min

Unison's Paul Chiusano on how Abstraction Will Save Distributed Computing

13 september 2017 | 86 min

Research Recap Five

11 september 2017 | 76 min

Research Recap Four

28 augusti 2017 | 39 min

Looker's Lloyd Tabb on Growing Languages Through Deprecation

25 augusti 2017 | 69 min

Research Recap Three (WoofJS Workflow)

24 augusti 2017 | 27 min

Samantha John Of Hopscotch On Learnable Programming

11 augusti 2017 | 60 min

Research Recap Two

31 juli 2017 | 44 min

Jonathan Leung on Inventing on Principle

21 juli 2017 | 82 min

Research Recap - A Year in Review

19 juli 2017 | 54 min

Welcome to the Future of Coding

14 juli 2017 | 4 min

Future of Coding

Avsnitt

Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing (feat. Felienne Hermans)

A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans

Is the Whole Universe a Computer™?

Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning

Pygmalion by David C. Smith

Elephant in the Room

Beyond Efficiency by Dave Ackley

Myths & Mythconceptions by Mary Shaw

Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler

Considered Harmful

A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi

Interpreting the Rule(s) of Code by Laurence Diver

INTERCAL by Donald Woods & James Lyon

Out of the Tar Pit by Ben Moseley & Peter Marks

No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks

Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur

Magic Ink by Bret Victor

Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel

Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel

Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg

Augmenting Human Intellect by Doug Engelbart

Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklider

Ella Hoeppner: Vlojure

Scott Anderson: End-user Programming in VR

Amjad Masad: Replit

Toby Schachman: Cuttle, Apparatus, and Recursive Drawing

Mary Rose Cook: Isla & Code Lauren

Ravi Chugh: Sketch-n-Sketch

Jennifer Jacobs: Para & Dynamic Brushes

Max/MSP & Pure Data: Miller Puckette

2020 Community Survey

Orca: Devine Lu Linvega

Making Your Own Tools: Devine Lu Linvega

Unveiling Dark: Ellen Chisa & Paul Biggar

Blurring the Line Between User and Programmer: Lane Shackleton

The Aesthetics of Programming Tools: Jack Rusher

Joining Logic, Relational, and Functional Programming: Michael Arntzenius

Mathematical Foundations for the Activity of Programming: Cyrus Omar

The Case for Formal Methods: Hillel Wayne

De-Nerding Programming: Jonathan Edwards

Moldable Development: Tudor Girba

Democratizing Web Design: Vlad Magdalin

The Edges of Representation: Katherine Ye

Reflection 14: /about

Basic Developer Human Rights: Quinn Slack

Sustaining the Underfunded: Nadia Eghbal

On The Maintenance Of Large Software: James Koppel

Reflection Thirteen - Independent mentorship

Exploring Dynamicland - Omar Rizwan

Bringing Explicit Modeling To The Web: David K Piano

Compassion & Programming: Glen Chiacchieri

You Should Consider Some States Kevin Lynagh

Stop Being A Sysadmin For Your Own Machine: Nick Santos

Teaching Abstraction: Brent Yorgey

Learning Programming At Scale: Philip Guo

Building for Developers: Aidan Cunniffe

Coding On (the) Beach: Jason Brennan

Building Universe: Joe Cohen

Research Recap Nine: Constructing My Crusade

Bootstrapping Bubble.is: Emmanuel Straschnov

Research Recap Eight: Life & Work Planning

Raising Genius with Scott Mueller

Research Recap Seven - Master Planning

Teaching Elm To 4th Graders: Christopher Anand

Research Recap Six: CycleJS Deep Dive

How ReactJS was created - with Pete Hunt

Unison's Paul Chiusano on how Abstraction Will Save Distributed Computing

Research Recap Five

Research Recap Four

Looker's Lloyd Tabb on Growing Languages Through Deprecation

Research Recap Three (WoofJS Workflow)

Samantha John Of Hopscotch On Learnable Programming

Research Recap Two

Jonathan Leung on Inventing on Principle

Research Recap - A Year in Review

Welcome to the Future of Coding

Fler poddar

Revolutions