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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/06 Week 5
2025-06-30 09:02
🎥 Virtual Meetup 12 • June 2025 🗓️ Next FoC Meetup 🔌 MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
Share Your Work
🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 📝 Explaining software and computational methods
A blog post about my recent work, which is what I demoed a while ago in an online meetup: Explaining software and computational methods
🗨️ Guyren Howe: 📝 First-Class Models: The Missing Productivity Revolution
This will likely interest the folks here:
📝 First-Class Models: The Missing Productivity Revolution
TL;DR: First-class models with branching and merging capabilities represent an almost entirely unused enormous productivity and expressiveness unlock in programming and computer systems.
🗨️ Scott: 🔌 MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
Wrote up some more thoughts based on the idea I shared over in of-ai. I think MCP might be the answer to "how" we're going to get the personalized/customizable software that people keep saying AI is going to make possible: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
🗨️ Ivan Reese:
I'm really happy with this month's FoC bonus episode discussion. Jimmy and I talk about literal values in code (string, numbers, arrays, etc), looking at them as affordances, trying to think about the human-facing elements of their design, as distinct from (but related to) how they serve as syntax, how they get parsed, what they mean at runtime, etc. We also ruminate on literal values in various flavours of visual programming.
You do need to subscribe in order to hear the episode ($5/mo), but by doing so you're also supporting the time/effort it takes us to make both these bonus episodes and the main show. So thank you to everyone who does support this effort, and hopefully you find this discussion invigorating.
DevLog Together
🗨️ Kartik Agaram: 🎥 James Boyd White, "Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law" : Kartik Agaram - Internet Archive
It seemed worth doing: I just recorded a video reading out every word of the 1985 paper "Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law".
In which I read out every word of James Boyd White's 1985 paper, Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life which spawned the...
Linking Together
🗨️ wtaysom:
Over time Cory Doctorow's fictional futures have gradually moved closer and closer to the present, and in "Picks and Shovels" the clock finally turns back to around 1985, and I have three FoC relevant quotes...
Thumbing further [through an issue of Creative Computing], I found an ad for something called a “Logo Turtle” billed as a “cybernetic toy” that you programmed in “a language for poets, scientists and philosophers.” I decided I liked whoever had written that ad.
Accounting was fascinating enough, but the fact that we were doing it in VisiCalc spreadsheets made it all-consuming. Auto-mating the tabulations made it possible to automate errors, to commit them with a scale and velocity that mere pen-and-paper accountancy could not have hoped to match. Tiny errors in formulas could cascade through sheets and workbooks, creating subtle, compounding errors that were nearly impossible to catch and even harder to root out.
I'll put the third, longer quote into the thread, but it begins "Spreadsheets are a form of science fiction."
End User Programming
🗨️ hvrosen: Teen Hacker Fined After Making Local Traffic Lights Sync Properly
End-user programming in-the-wild ;-)
Teen Hacker Fined After Making Local Traffic Lights Sync Properly
Present Company
🗨️ Ivan Reese: 🎥 Virtual Meetup 12 • June 2025
The most recent FoC Virtual Meetup was fantastic. Three great presentations covering a pretty wide range of the FoC spectrum. The recording is live right here. Thanks again to our presenters, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone next month.
🗨️ Tom Larkworthy: 🦋 interjectedfuture.com
Thinking about this post implying node-and-wires are mutally exclusive with ASCII code and also thinking about guitarvydas dislike of functions. Also connecting it with my own ideas that a good notebook should offer "multiple views of the same thing".
Made me think: why is everyone stuck on the idea that there is one one possible representation? And I think guitarvydas has a point, it may be the function calling paradigm. In my work, I don't have this problem because cells subscribe to other cells in dataflow, so multiple consumers of a computation is not a problem. cells pull their dependancies. Whereas function calling is "pushing" values. The problem with pushing is you can only have one target. But with pulling you can have multiple consumers from one source. functions is building out of 1-to-1 links, but pulling is 1-to-many inherently.
I don't think that argument is water tight coz, of course, its all Turing computable, but I do think there is something in there that function calling ends up naturally reducing computational reusability so that trying to do pub-sub communication patterns ends up way harder and buggier than it should so you shouldn't bother unless absolutely necessary. But if you build out of pub-sub exclusively then you don't see multiple views of the same thing as an unusual concept.
Nodes and wires are so attractive because it's legible in a certain context. The context is when you're a beginner and you want to see the in-between results.
Breaks down when you know syntax, when you can imagine the intermediates in your head, and when the program gets large.
🗨️ Maikel: 🗓️ FoC Meetup · Luma
Hi, we have a date for our new online FoC meetup : Wednesday 23th of July 18:00UTC ..this is the link for the event on luma : https://lu.ma/1d5mc44t .. and more information about the setup of our virtual meetups can be found here: https://futureofcoding.org/meetups (please read carefully if you want to demo/present) .. for next meetup we already have one confirmed guest so we're looking for2 more demo/presenter. Let us know in the chat here or contact me directly. Thanks!
Information about our meetup can be found here : https://futureofcoding.org/meetups
👨🏽💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra
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