💻 Moldable Webfile 📝 Coding is not the new literacy 🖐 Wrapper: Better web-based prototypes for iPad

Our Work

📝 AI risk I don’t see discussed via Guyren Howe

🧵 conversation

Hopefully this is regarded as sufficiently on topic…

I’ve started a personal blog. My first post is on an AI risk I don’t see discussed.

💻 Moldable Webfile (prototype II) via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

OK I finally put all the pieces together into a coherent whole but its still an MVP

tomlarkworthy.github.io/lopecode/webpage.html

a self-hosted, self-sustainable, recursively exportable, offline-first, file-first, hermetic, web-based programming substrate based on the Observable runtime (and the source code is an Observable notebook)

I am seeking ideas on what to do next with it next? What would make it desirable to use for a project? There is an AI in it but I don't have a UI for it. Or maybe I figure out how to do content editable cells, or maybe port some bigger demos (e.g. 3d stuff, maybe VR?)

🖐 Wrapper: Better web-based prototypes for iPad via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's a little thing I made that solves an extremely specific problem.

At Ink & Switch, one of the things we're researching is a new kind of "dynamic notebook" — something sort of like a pad of paper, but programmable. As part of this research we build a lot of little prototype apps. We use the web platform for prototyping because the iteration time is really fast. We run these prototypes on iPad, because the form factor (tablet + stylus) is very close to what we have in mind for our dynamic notebook. But a limitation of the Safari browser on iPad is that you can't receive simultaneous input from the Apple Pencil and your fingers.

To work around this limitation, we built a little native iPad app in Swift. It loads a URL of your choosing (ie: the live-reloading dev server running your prototype de jour), then captures all incoming touch and pencil events on the native side and forwards them to the JS context. Just like that, your JS code gets full-fidelity (ie: 240 Hz) simultaneous input from fingers and the pen. And, if you want to hack in additional features that aren't available via the browser — like haptic feedback — you can easily whip that up on the Swift side.

I've just packaged-up this Xcode project and some example JS code and put them up on Github: Wrapper. The code is covered by the Unlicense (public domain) so that you can scavenge this thing for parts without worry about credit or whatever. Just make shit!

So, if you have a Mac, an iPad, and an Apple Pencil… and you want to do some experiments with rich gestural interfaces… and you want to write those experiments in JS… and you're in a hurry… then this project might be useful for you :)

📝 The Organization of Digital Information Systems via Federico Pereiro

🧵 conversation

Hi everyone! Over the last three months I've written a treatise (fancy noun!) with a view to understand computation systematically. My goal was to create, at least for myself, a coherent picture of what's essential about all this bit pushing we do individually and societally. I intend that picture to be empowering and actionable to those of us trying to make sense of systems, as well as build (much) better systems.

It's about 40-50 pages long, so it's not short, and probably quite dense, despite me trying to make it as conversational as possible. I have a visual summary of it linked at the top but it's yet incomplete (I'll finish it tomorrow).

My goal in posting it here is to get some feedback. I'm especially looking for thoughtful disagreement, particularly concerning my main points. Something quite at the top of Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy. I'm really open to challenge to my main points; if what I wrote is any good, it should be anti-fragile and get better with a good critique. And if it doesn't, hey, at least I learned something! And I'll be happy to share what I learn from you too (as long as you manage to convince me).

Here it goes: github.com/altocodenl/todis

💬 Cole Lawrence

🧵 conversation

I’m working on a new way of writing “dense” UI inspired by MVVM + ECS, and this is the debugger for the “View Model Components” (VMCs?) in the UI

The problem I’m usually facing with my apps is that we aim to pack many many features into small areas (for example: context menus, keyboard shortcuts, focus management, spatial navigation, version control diff presentation, multiplayer user presence, and then the parts that are unique to your app).

My goal in managing this complexity is to be able to write each individual part of the application in its own single file. All things related to “module” editing, diffing, keyboard shortcuts, spatial navigation, CRDT sync, etc should be in a single file. Then, each shared behavior’s logic are implemented in their own single files. This is what is best as well for LLMs to understand and build out features without needing to understand everything all at once.

Here, I’ve taken a video of just the “debugger” I developed in the last two days to observe the state of all these components for each item in the world.

🎥 Phosphor

Devlog Together

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Progress on "Emacs for visualizing LÖVE apps": I have the first message between windows. I press a key, the key gets processed by the first window's keymap and dispatched to a function, which reads the selection, parses it and sends a message to the second window. The second window then responds to the message by adding a new object into its scene.

In principle, this approach feels nice and timeless. I think "every window is a scene and runs its own event loop" is more general a foundation than Emacs's "every window is a buffer containing text." It feels realistic to provide this foundation alongside a wide library of primitives for text rendering and analysis.

In practice, I've been struggling to find a focus, and I'm probably going to focus on creating tools for myself to more visually debug the LÖVE apps I create. I'm not going to focus at the moment on:

• editing the source code for the environment in the environment, the way you can modify Emacs sources from within Emacs. I already have a way to do that: you open a second window and modify the app live as it runs.
• interfacing with other processes or tools besides LÖVE, the way Emacs lets you connect to any programming language REPL.

Both these are totally feasible. I don't think any crucial infrastructure is missing here. They're just not priorities for me right now. I plan to focus on more easily adding new windows to a LÖVE app, and creating new kinds of debug UIs in them.

One open question: supporting focus follows mouse. I don't know if it's possible in Emacs, and even if not I think it makes a lot more sense in a more graphics- and mouse-centered environment. Again, not a priority but perhaps this is a sign this foundation is not quite as timeless as I would like.

🎥 motley message

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

The kids have been playing with a pen on a pendulum, I don't know what the technical term is for it, but that didn't stop me from playing with it. This way I can adjust the friction.

🎥 pendulum

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

I think there is a shortcut to direct manipulation by "inverting" grammar of graphics.

🎥 direct manipulation

Reading Together

📝 Naur: Programming as Theory Building via Federico Pereiro

🧵 conversation

My first time reading a classic: Naur on programming as theory building.

Loved the article and disagreed with almost everything. Sharing my private thoughts without polish or much justification, in case someone's interested in a dissenting opinion 😅

• I think Naur is not quite right. It's not theory building. It's the building of a representation of reality, that in itself can be a part of reality.

• My take: if programs are much more readable, and we have a set of universal constructs for thinking programs, then reading and modifying a program doesn't require an external entity. There needn't be a private theory of the program except for the program itself (and any documentation in natural language). The theory should be readable from the constraints and the words/calls used in the system.

• Simplicity can be evaluated as relative length of two solutions that do the same thing.

• "Theory" can be rediscovered by studying both the problem domain and the solution.

• Naur's concept of the theory of a program is downright animist. The theory is an entity living in the programmers that created the program, and can only be communicated by them while they are working in the program. When the program stops being worked up, the theory quickly fades and dies. No amount of program or documentation reading is going to revive it.

• I think a more accurate and constructive view of programming considers it akin to an intellectual or scientific discipline, where a thread can be maintained over time through language, even if the chain is not transmitted orally.

Content

🧑‍🏫 PhD in Digital Movement for Interaction Design via Joel Gethin Lewis

🧵 conversation

Opportunity for a fully funded practice based PhD in Digital Movement for Interaction Design in Oslo, Norway, through my friend Lise Hansen: jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/272911/phd-in-digital-movement-for-interaction-design

🐦 GalaxyBrain. A powerful JSON-based information operating system via Marcin Ignac

🧵 conversation

"GalaxyBrain. A powerful JSON-based information operating system. " - looks super interesting

📝 Coding is not the new literacy via Oleksandr Kryvonos

🧵 conversation

my notes app suddenly revealed the link I read a while ago, due to the fact that I rewrote search function

🎥 Proofs without words: the example of the Ramanujan continued fraction via Mattia Fregola

🧵 conversation

Proofs without words: the example of the Ramanujan continued fraction

🎥 SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 – Real-Time Live! via Dany

🧵 conversation

Interactive Music Effect Playground, may be of interest.

Present Company

💬 Tomas Petricek

🧵 conversation

For a research project we're doing, I'm looking for some Excel experts - if you (or someone you know) have done something non-trivial with Excel, please let me know! We are thinking of doing some additions to the spreadsheet programming model and are curious how people currently solve the kind of problems we are interested in - so we want to ask people to solve a series of task and see how they would think about them. (I know it is hard to say who is "Excel expert" - ideally, we are looking for people who will have some thoughts about different ways of structuring larger things or encoding some kind of simulations using Excel.)

📞 Call for Case Studies via Vitorio Miliano

🧵 conversation

Hey, folks, if you're working with AI to help you spec, prototype, or build your projects; or if you're designing forward-looking interfaces to help utilize or apply AI, I'd encourage you to put in for a talk at Rosenfeld Media's upcoming Designing with AI 2025 conference. A colleague is doing the curation, and they're looking especially for cutting edge explorations like get shown here on the regular (just looking in #share-your-work, Mariano Guerra, @Francisco Garau, Maikel van de Lisdonk, @Pavel Mikhailovskii!). The CfP is short and it's currently slated to close this week: rosenfeldmedia.com/designing-with-ai/call-for-case-studies (happy to pass along any questions if you have them). The conference is fully virtual, they have a great speaker prep process, and there's an honorarium. Thanks!

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎙️ FoC #74 • Is the Whole Universe a Computer™? 🎥 Fibonacci sequence in visual editor 🧬 undulant interface for genetic music manipulation

Two Minute Week

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

My first attempt at putting all the pieces together to create a self-editable, zero toolchain, offline-first webpage with good debugger support. My CSS is quite weak so I need some more time to make it responsive and look cool, but the general idea is visible.

🎥 moldable website

Our Work

🐸 todepond.com/code via Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

I'm really pleased to finally share my first-ever published paper (at last!)

This is...

DIALOGUES ON NATURAL CODE

by me and Dave Ackley

Please enjoy!!!!!

🐦 Hey Gadget, build me a CRM via Harry Brundage

🧵 conversation

my team and i have a little bit heretical take on the future of coding, which is that all the accidental complexity for building so much useful stuff comes from systems integration these days, not the programming language or environment so much. we've been hard at work on a systems-integrated development platform, and are now just launching our take on AI, starting with full app-at-a-time app generation. it takes advantage of all the systems integration we've done to produce apps that have real, working frontends, backends, data storage, auth, caching, apis, etc, and does it the hard way such that you can fully fiddle with all the code and make just about anything. curious what you all think! here's the preview and link: Hey Gadget, build me a CRM , DM me if you want early access i will let all you smart folks in!

🎥 Fibonacci sequence in visual editor via Peter Saxton

🧵 conversation

It's taken a while but after some conversations I had about making a structural editor that wasn't all keyboard shortcuts I finally have something to share.

I keep calling this a visual ui but that's probably not accurate as all the editors where visual.

It's a point and click discoverable ui for the structural editor. And here I walk through using it to build a Fibonacci sequence

🎙️ FoC Episode 74 • Is the Whole Universe a Computer™? via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

It's been so long since we released the last FoC episode that it disappeared behind Slack's horizon. Well, happy new year, here's an episode we recorded back in September!! It's been kinda nuts for the past few months, so sorry for the radio silence.

FoC Episode 74 • Is the Whole Universe a Computer™?

Jack Copeland, Mark Sprevak, and Oron Shagrir ask this question in chapter 41 of their book, The Turing Guide. They split this question in two, first asking whether the universe itself is a computer, then whether the universe could even be computed. These are lofty, unanswerable questions, sure, but they encroach on our territory — philosophy, automata, nonsense. So, in our usual reverent style and with attentive pacing, the three of us explore the paper, the questions, the answers they choose to highlight, and even share a few perfectly reasonable answers of our own.

Devlog Together

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Beginnings of a tiling window manager. Still a bug as you can see. I need to come up with a clean way to constrain motion within an arbitrarily nested tree of windows.

🎥 motley wm

🪟 👋🏽 Hello Golden layout 2.6.0 via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Somewhat inspired by Kartik Agaram I thought I would look at tiling managers / dockables for the web

📝 👋🏽 Hello Golden layout 2.6.0

Drag and drop window management. http://golden-layout.com/ This example persists to local storage! Golden Layout supports persisting the layout, but the draw-back is the componentState has to be serialisable, you cannot just pass nodes through, instead you need to look them up. It might make sense to exploit views to push or pull state in and out of components Saving state to local-storage.

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Yeah being able to reactively live edit dependancies is quite useful for fixing imported CSS. Good progress on the CSS, starting to look cool, starting to be usable.

🎥 My Movie

💬 Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

Fooling around with visual animation as a way to describe algorithms (instead of strict linearization and time-flattening of written code). Inspired by Kartik Agaram's comments and this 💬 #thinking-together@2025-01-02. I'm not sure where this is going, but, I'm looking at the Wick editor, Apple Keynote, etc.

[January 2nd, 2025 6:57 AM] burningion: on a similar note, I'd like to have animations on diagrams of ideas for a blog post I'm working on. what sorts of tools or libraries should I be using to make this easier?

I'd like to add a button to send a message, and animate how it flows from the encoder to the decoder

Thinking Together

📝 Towards Diagram Compilation via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

I'm thinking about compiling this diagram to code. I don't know if this thought experiment should be posted to thinking-together or devlog-together.

💬 KP Kaiser

🧵 conversation

on a similar note, I'd like to have animations on diagrams of ideas for a blog post I'm working on. what sorts of tools or libraries should I be using to make this easier?

I'd like to add a button to send a message, and animate how it flows from the encoder to the decoder

💬 Daniel Harris

🧵 conversation

"Our tech is shaped by our need to make money". Apps and services are discrete items because they need to be packaged for sale or hire. These are my New Year musings. I'm curious if anyone else has thought about what influence our need to make money has made on the shape of our tech. App stores definitely promote the idea of discrete units that can be sold/hired because they make a cut of the transaction. I'm sure there's also an I made this factor playing out. I guess I'm wondering what if collaboration was the pervasive modus operandi? What would our tech look like then? What if we didn't need to package apps up as discrete branded units? What would the tech world look like? How would we build functionality? What if we never needed to earn anything from software? How much better could it be? What restrictions do we place on apps because we need to make money from them? And how much better would they be if we didn't need to do that? Purely from a technology angle. Even though there are loads of non-profit open source projects creating tech we are still stuck in the more pervasive paradigm of packaged units of code. How much better could we be? Of course, this is a pretty simplistic view of the world but anyone ever thought about this stuff?

Content

🧬 synopsis-04: lobe ui via Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

lobe ui: an undulant interface for genetic music manipulation system (2000)

Present Company

🃏 this thing via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Sharing this thing @andrew blinn is working on because it's delightful.

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🕶️ Visualizer: Own Cell Renderer 📚 Advent of Papers (2024) 🌳 Tree Calculus

Our Work

🎨 Splash is a colour format via Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

i made an explainable for a weird colour format i use

Splash

todepond.com/lab/splash

💻 all pairs via misha

🧵 conversation

I made a thing! akovantsev.github.io/corpus/pairs-campaign

🎙️ FUTURE OF CODING: INTERVIEW via Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

Bonus episode alert!

FUTURE OF CODING: INTERVIEW

(featuring @Philippa Markovics)

This is the first FUTURE OF CODING interview since January 2022.

It's an experimental pilot so it's for patrons only this time. Thank you to everyone who supports the podcast and I hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look!

I tried out various different editing techniques to give them a whirrrrrrr before the Real Interviews. Let me know what you think!!!!!

I really enjoyed Steve Krouse's wholesome interviews back in the day so I hope I can do them justice with a 2024/2025 version. I promise this first one is (at the very least) not boring. Any other qualities are up to you to determine.

Of course, many thanks to Philippa for helping me out and being my first victim (and we'll maybe see her again soon).

Devlog Together

💬 Jimmy Miller

🧵 conversation

Finally getting to work on beagle again. I was able to get some Cffi working. So here you see a simple sdl application and a socket server on a background thread. I made a quick vs code extension that sends the contents of a buffer to this socket and the code evals. Now I have a quick and simple live coding setup. Here I just invoke a function, but you can redefine functions as well. I need to work on live redefinition of structs and all sorts of bugs and edge cases. But it's pretty exciting to see some real stuff working!

💬 Roma Komarov

🧵 conversation

Working on a native CSS mixin that would allow to easily debug any other custom properties in CSS by outputting their value into ::after pseudo-element. It is sometimes frustrating doing various complex calculations in CSS while not seeing the result itself (without applying it to something), and without looking into devtools (which is nice, but can be slow). So, being able to just output some CSS variable, calculation, viewport, or container unit for any element just by assigning a single CSS variable will be very useful.

(the code for achieving this is overcomplicated — but 100% fine for debugging purposes; I'll try to write an article about it in the next few weeks)

🎥 Screen Recording

🕶️ Visualizer: Own Cell Renderer via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

got the notebook cell visualizer finished. Its the final part MVP part for an userspace Observable-like experience off the platform, but I still need to actually put all the pieces together so its not hugely interesting yet observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/visualizer.

💻 just stage every change in git repo via Oleksandr Kryvonos

🧵 conversation

so previously I created a small tool that creates commits on every file change

and though it was very fun in the beginning it turned out to be a trouble to remember what I actually did

so now I downgraded it to just "create a new feature branch if I make some changed on main branch and stage everything"

github.com/uprun/git-auto-commit

🐘 Emacs via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

After a conversation with Jack Rusher and others about Emacs Nature, and playing with Seymour by @Alessandro Warth, I'm getting interested in building..

An environment for visualizing programs

(Not to be confused with visual programs, or visualization more generally.)

• Start with a tiling window manager for managing named graphical canvas "buffers", using Emacs operations like split and resize.
• Each buffer exposes a coordinate space of its choosing, listens for messages and positions objects in the space in response to messages.
• Buffers can send messages to other buffers.

Examples, etc. in 🧵

Reading Together

📚 Advent of Papers (2024) via Jimmy Miller

🧵 conversation

Maybe I should have posted this here at the beginning. But I did an advent of papers. All of them are papers we haven't done on Future of Coding. And most of them will probably never be papers we do

Thinking Together

💬 Iacob Nasca

🧵 conversation

does anyone work on making a programming language ? and if so, can you share a repo or some notes ? I'm curious what features are you implementing and what programming language are you using do develop it and how you do the codegen part. I'm currently struggling quite a bit with LLVM

Content

🌳 Tree Calculus via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

Tree calculus is minimal, modular, Turing-complete, reflective

anyone has any opinions on this?

One operator. Trivial semantics. Turing complete. Intensional.

✍️ Drakon via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Drakon is a visual programming language. I haven't dug into the modern editor implementation yet; the language description pdf is lovely just as an opinionated guide to drawing clear visual descriptions of programs.

📝 alt.chi via Andrew McNutt

🧵 conversation

Kind of a weird link, but:

There’s a paper under review at alt chi right now called “Eden OS: A Call for a New Concept and Metaphor for Operating Systems for PCs”. This feels within the remit of this community and looks pretty interesting. Alt chi does an interesting thing where anyone can review any paper, all you need to do is volunteer to review for it on PCS (some instructions avail here). So, if this seems interesting to you, you can read it now or review if you want

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🛡️ Unusual programming environment for counting 🎥 Incremental Graph Code 🏹 tldraw computer

Our Work

🛡️ Droste's Lair is an unusual programming environment for building and counting mathematical structures via Elliot

🧵 conversation

Joshua Horowitz and I invite you to explore our experimental visual programming environment (which takes place in a dungeon)

Features

• dissolve the bounds of decision and explore all possibilities at once

• use sigillic incantations, delve into recursive caverns

🎥 Incremental Graph Code (IGC) Introduction via Thomas van Binsbergen

🧵 conversation

This video demos a prototype that Max Boksem and I built to investigate a modular graph structure for representing and running source code . The tool allows you to create different projections out of the code such as code structure, documentation view, and execution history. The tool supports incremental and exploratory programming (multiple execution sessions) and "nested graphs" (importing a graph as a node) for hierarchical views. The work was presented at Splash earlier. See the paper here. Konrad Hinsen, this is the video I promised you a while ago.

Devlog Together

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

There were some tricky problems to solve to get to this. Still glitching and a WIP, but finally piece number 3 is beginning to come together, a userspace notebook renderer inside a notebook, that works with the existing observable notebook cells, but whose layout state can be drastically different, and yet still persisted via single file export. All the pieces are reactively editable insider the notebook. The notebook state is the editor. There is no distinction between the development UI and the executing program, and its a single 1.2MB HTML file that works offline.

🎥 lopebook

Thinking Together

💬 Alex North

🧵 conversation

Does anyone know of any DSLs or similar that are specific to graph/chart drawing? I.e. a language that defines a function from data to image, specialised toward visualising data?

If not, what’s the closest thing? E.g. is there a JS chart-drawing library with an API that feels close to a DSL?

💬 Jason Morris

🧵 conversation

I have been working with large-ish knowledge graphs on and off over the course of the year, and I keep running into the same problem... my intuition for what I have done when I modify the graph and how it will effect everything else is just dismally bad. I make what seems like will be an incremental change, and it doesn't do what I expected, or if it does, it breaks all my algorithms. This happens with other data structures, too, obviously. But with graph data it happens far more often, as in nearly always, and the time between "it isn't working" and "oh, I know how I broke it" is much longer. So I'm wondering, assuming that my experience is not unique, is there something about graphs that makes them harder to grok? The absence of a clear serialization, the absence of order, complexity of structure? Or is it a UI problem, and if I could just see what I was doing it wouldn't be so bad... Often, when I come to a particularly hard problem, I sample and visualize the graph, and learn that the previous three problems were not correctly solved. So visualization helps, but is that enough? Or is there something fundamentally inhuman about large, dense graphs?

Content

🏹 tldraw computer via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

computer.tldraw.com ... I think it's awesome! And I am a bit jealous but in a good way 😄 .. very inspirational and I think this is what the chatgpt canvas should have been

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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📺 Variable design 📢 FoC Virtual Meetup 2025.1 📝 Problems people are motivated by

Our Work

🧮 Pictures of Pensions – Calc with Dec via Declan

🧵 conversation

I made a 'narrative visualization' blog post that's about pension savings. Like other places I use calculang it combines reactive programming/visualization (OJS and Vega) and calculang models (a pension calculator, which is using a separate income tax model for a tax relief calc- an example of model composition)

FP nature of calculang and no state and FRP nature of the rest makes it kinda easy to put together - Some viz signals and some calculang parameters condition on progress which increments as the user scrolls (the reactive systems do the rest).

I'd like to bring a few tools together to streamline DX for this kind of output for calculang models - it could be even more declarative. (+see Fidyll)

Happy to hear any feedback or suggestions.

🎥 Live Coding an Interactive Tool with Val Town & AI via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

Live Coding Interactive Tools with Val Town & LLMs

Quickly prototype interactive data components without the need for local installation or setup

First FoC tool collab? 🙂

🖩 Mortgage Calculator via edward

🧵 conversation

I wrote a Mortgage calculator web app, suitable for use with Mobile devices, using my Super Duper Pythonic language. It makes it easy to build rubbery user interfaces that adapt to the device size by specifying things using proportions when possible. Keeps things legible without fussing over measurements. App is at voicecarrier.com/lab/calc/calc.html, source code is at screenshot of calculator

I couldn't stand how complex the web is to build for, especially when you want to make things legible.

The key strategy for simplification is to make the layout and rendering part of the language, and having all subdivision of the screen be executable statements that can be put into loops and conditional clauses, making the entire page layout programmatic as opposed to static, which is the great flaw of HTML.

Devlog Together

📝 RT - Now What? Towards Higher Level Syntax for Programming Languages via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

I've implemented a rough-in of a VHLL (Very High Level Language) and used it to write a non-trivial program (a mutual multi-tasking kernel that does message passing, about 1,400 LOC). It generates Python, Common Lisp and Javascript (node.js) code, essentially using existing languages as assemblers. This uses a variety of techniques, including a DPL (diagrammatic programming language), t2t (text-to-text transpilation) and a jury-rigged REPL programming language workbench. Several mundane gotchas were wrestled down. Now, I'm wondering what direction to take this next. My thought is that this needs to run in a browser (Javascript, WASM?), but that exceeds my limited knowledge and will require going down new learning curves. Maybe I'm thinking too much inside-the-box? Comments (and help) appreciated. FWIW more detail: RT - Now What? which further references RT Transpiler

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Miniscule progress on an alternative notebook renderer that hacks the observable runtime to capture all the values. Behold, "foo" is rendered in two places! One of those places is a giant cells containing every other cell in the notebook.... that is what visualizer will be. A cell that renders the whole. So then the outer HTML frame will not actually provide any DOM nodes for the runtime to render into externally, the engine will start and visualizer will dynamically create DOM nodes to render the rest from the inside. An inversion, much more hackable that way.

🎥 synced cells

📝 Building A DSL - Example DSL That Generates Python Code via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

Incremental progress documenting writing of a DSL and generating code from it. A quick overview video...

Thinking Together

📝 Problems people are motivated by via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I still think about this every once in a while.

🎥 Marcin Ignac, Variable.io - Variable design /KIKK24 via Jack Rusher

🧵 conversation

If you liked the above project, you might also enjoy Marcin Ignac’s talk from KIKK 2024, which features more of his studio’s work and some additional insights into their in-house visual programming environment.

🤖

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

we just got Devin, pretty slick slack based workflow. Still teaching it we use python 3.10 but it seems like its quite useful for dependabot alerts. I am seeing if it can do a decent refactor or not.

Present Company

📢 Virtual Meetup 2025.1 via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

Hi, on wednesday 22th jan 2025 (16:00 UTC) we will have our first online meetup of 2025 and we will continue in the same format with short live demo's and presentations from our community .. the meetup is also on Virtual Meetup 2025.1 .. if anyone wants to give a demo about their project or give a short talk then please let us know here in the thread of this message 😀

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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👋 Staying Observable 📝 Research as leisure activity 🧑‍💻 Malleable Systems Collective

Two Minute Week

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Editing the source code of notebook dependancies reactively. This is something you can't do in Observable which is where the non-interleaved editor actually has an advantage.

🎥 Edit Dependancies

👋 Editor with Exporter via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

OK Part II done! The userspace editor + userspace exporter playing together nicely. You can try it out here. In theory you should be able to edit, export and upload to S3 without even logging into Observable. (There is not way to manage the layout of a notebook though, thats part III, so its sorta too limited to be useful yet).

🎥 Tom Larkworthy's Video - Dec 7, 2024

Our Work

📕 ☞ Computation and Wonder, Soon in Book Form! via Sam Arbesman

🧵 conversation

Hey everyone! I've been working on a book called The Magic of Cod e and it is going to be seeing the light of day next year! It is about the wonders and weirdness of computation, and how thinking about computers and code and lead one to think about everything from philosophy and language to biology and the nature of thought. It explores many "future of coding" themes and is geared towards a general audience (though I think there are enough weird topics in it that even experts will hopefully find something of interest!). Here's a bit more about the book:

📝 ☞ Computation and Wonder, Soon in Book Form!

You can now preorder my forthcoming book "The Magic of Code"!

🕸️ Smallweb - Your internet folder via Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

Hey, I'm running an experiment: There is a public shared instance of smallweb running at smallweb.live.

Come and leave something there (you can even break it, but I'm sure you'll be nice).

📝 Smallweb - Your internet folder

A self-hostable personal cloud inspired by serverless platforms and cgi-bin.

Devlog Together

💡 December Adventure via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

I'm doing @Eli Mellen’s December Adventure this year. I won't post here every day, but today is my first one, and it's fun, so here you go.

… I made an RSS feed of just the CSS rules on my website: ivanish.ca/feeds

💻 Markov Chain Monte Carlo via Tom Lieber

🧵 conversation

😌😌😌

I finally cracked it. I replaced the uniform sampler with MCMC, and made a large optimization pass, and now the plots converge beautifully in only a few seconds. (Compare with my last video!)

🎥 tug-of-war mcmc and optimizations

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

I was a bit worried because I discovered quite late in the day that my decompiler/compiler pair was stripping comments. Urgh, of course, 'cos its AST based. Luckily, escodegen and acorn do have comment preserving features, and Observable's acorn wrapper passes on arguments in a way that means I could get comments round tripping too 😅 Close call, programming without comments would be a fairly substantial deficiency.

🧵 conversation

Oh being able to edit dependancies is actually useful. I can insert debugger statements into dependancies. Then, when I apply the source update, the hot reload reruns them and then triggers the debugger inside their context.

💬 Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

🎥 What if visual programming interfaces had weather?

🦋 ezhik.me via Ezhik

🧵 conversation

so i started toying with something a bit weird and i'm honestly not sure what i think so far:

@ezhik.me: was messing around with creating #obsidian plugins and may have accidentally come up with a novel #pkm system?

notetaking nerds does this seem like something interesting or did smalltalk koolaid drive me insane?

but like i have this implemented and working in obsidian today for better or worse.

like i notice people doing wild stuff with their obsidians and notions - basically creating entire personalized apps and databases and i think it's cool as hell - like it just show how much people want to code for themselves, it's 100% end-user programming.

and now i wanted to solve a small problem for myself and accidentally made a type system for obsidian and i kinda wonder what else could be done with it? like what if each note was a bit like a val.town val and could contain some code? what if this "class" system could be extended to, for example, allow providing data fields? then this could be some sort of a strange database, perhaps more like the pre-rdbms hierarchical database systems?

what if 'end-user programming' as a concept could be something that grows out of people's own digital gardens, rather than from making "simpler" versions of professional tools?

🎥 Screen Recording

Thinking Together

📝 UTF-8 in usernames via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

Debian is currently struggling with allowing UTF-8 in usernames. I wrote about various challenges involved in NAMING things (i.e. human-readable unique identifiers for concepts/topics or people etc): github.com/learn-awesome/learndb/wiki/Naming-Things

📝 Schnieder's algorithm via John Christensen

🧵 conversation

Does anyone have recommendations/resources (blogs, papers, implementations, etc.) on rendering hand drawn curves? Currently I'm just going from a raw list of cursor positions to a simplified list of Bezier curves using Schnieder's algorithm.

I want to try using pressure/tilt values from a cheap drawing tablet to draw more "natural" curves, but I don't currently have the vocabulary to find what work has been done in this area.

Also interested in any adjacent UX ideas for this type of interaction :)

Content

📝 Research as leisure activity via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Research as leisure activity

• directed by passions and instincts
• exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary
• involves as much rigor as necessary

🧑‍💻 Malleable Systems Collective via Duncan Cragg

🧵 conversation

J. Ryan Stinnett seems to have created malleable.systems with a forum forum.malleable.systems/t/welcome-to-the-forum/7 that's in a similar space to this one. I searched here but no-one seems to have mentioned it; I only just discovered it myself. I see Konrad Hinsen and Kartik Agaram on there and even Geoffrey Litt!

📝 Malleable Systems Collective

The Malleable Systems Collective catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power in computing

📝 Welcome to the forum

This is a long-form discussion forum for the malleable software community. You are welcome to share your malleable ideas and projects here. Our catalog is now hosted on this forum as well, and it is much easier to edit via wiki-style posts which anyone can contribute to. Our async chat room on Matrix is not going anywhere. This forum is additional communication medium that complements the Matrix room. Some topics are likely easier to discuss here, while others may be easier in the Matrix room....

📑 Roelof Knol | art portfolio via Greg Bylenok

🧵 conversation

It's art, but with some Dynamicland vibes. Most relevant are under "Selected Works" at the very bottom (sorry, no anchors on his website): roelofknol.com/portfolio

🪴 beautifully provocative via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Some beautifully provocative images of art + node-wire graph from Marcin Ignac

Present Company

📝 FutureOfCoding starter pack for Mastodon/Fediverse via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

I put together FutureOfCoding starter pack for Mastodon/Fediverse.

I added as many as I could. Some of your profiles are not discoverable and therefore, could not be added to this.

I would love to add more of you. Please reply in thread with your fediverse account.

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎥 Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing 🎈 Smalltalk & LLMs 🎥 FoC Virtual Meetup Video

Two Minute Week

🎥 Node output preview when dragging values on edges via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

In this video I show a small new feature : when dragging values on to edges (or connections as I like to call them), for node-types that support it ... a small preview shows the node output as a hint above the node. Currently only the expression and sum node-type support this. I am looking for a way to have every node-type support this.

Another small tweak is that the expression node-type triggers its output directly when the expression is changed. Previously the whole flow was retrigged and this new behavior feels much better.

Our Work

🎥 Mariano Guerra & Tudor Girba - LLMs & Smalltalk - UK Smalltalk User Group via Francisco Garau

🧵 conversation

The videos from last month presentation are now available:

[:kind | ‘Regards from ’, kind ] value: ‘The UK Smalltalk User Group’.

🎥 Mariano Guerra on LLMs

🎥 Tudor Girba on LLMs

🕸️ smallweb via Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

Hey, I'm working on smallweb, a self-hostable personal cloud.

It's inspired by by serveless platforms like val.town and old standards like cgi-bin. I still struggle to describe it. It feels like coding in dropbox, but in a good way.

For example, if I want to host my new blog in smallweb, I can do it by just creating a new folder at ~/smallweb/blog/main.ts :

import { Smallblog } from "jsr:@tayzendev/smallblog@1.1.5";



export default new Smallblog({

  siteTitle: "Pomdtr's Blog",

  defaultAuthors: ["pomdtr"],

});

Then, no need to run any terminal command or to wait for a deploy step, my blog is instantly available on the blog.pomdtr.me subdomain: blog.pomdtr.me (this one is hosted on my raspberrypi).

Apps also have write access to their own dir. For example, if you go to vscode-demo.smallweb.run, you'll be able to write in my own smallweb dir. Or feel free to draw me something at excalidraw.smallweb.run !

All of the websites hosted under the smallweb.run domain are open-source, and can be found at: gh.smallweb.run

📝 fishtower.conradgodfrey.com via Conrad Godfrey

🧵 conversation

Hi,

Sharing fish tower

Was built as half experiment with how quickly I could get a websocket real time thingy up and running, and to see if I could market a London Filet O Fish First Timer meetup using a webtoy.

I think people don't use webtoys to market real world events as much as I would've thought - I think this gets cheaper with AI and perhaps we'll see this a lot more?

fishtower.conradgodfrey.com

👓 LookAtThat: Render source code in 3D, for macOS and iOS via Ivan Lugo

🧵 conversation

Hello Future of Coding folks!

It's been a while since I've crawled out from my cave, but I've come to share something fun, at least I think so. I've finally managed to get the downloadable TestFlight betas up for free for my visualizer tool for macOS and iOS, and you can get the links here on the main GitHub page:

github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

Many thanks go out to everyone here that helped answer odd questions at odd hours to help me build this first releasable beta. Cheers, and let me know what breaks!

Devlog Together

💬 Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

"make illegal states unconnectable"

🎥 Screen Recording

📝 github.com/uprun/git-auto-commit via Oleksandr Kryvonos

🧵 conversation

I am back with small project ( ~work in progress~ already finalized),

Have you ever thought that git diff does not really show the history of changes you made and just shows the final state,

this can be solved with more granual commits,

so my project - github.com/uprun/git-auto-commit - creates commits when file changes,

in such way ~changes will be sent real-time and~ the transformation history is saved as well.

🛸 Eclector via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

Over the last weeks I have been working on my moldable inspector for Common Lisp again, with the goal of turning it into a support platform for explainable data science. One big task that I have finally achieved is code browsing. You can navigate through the code by clicking on symbols in displayed code. And you can transclude code into HTML, as shown on the first pane.

This wasn't trivial to do because Common Lisp cannot be statically parsed. When loading code, Lisp reads one top-level form (everything between a top-level pair of parentheses), executes it, and then goes on to the next one. The semantics of each form thus depend on the previous ones. Static parsing, as I do here, can never be perfect. The goal is getting the parser to deal with 99% of code correctly and not crash on the remaining 1%.

Fortunately, others had done most of the hard work, and I could use Eclector, a portable and extensible Common Lisp reader, as the basis for my code browser.

The code for my demo available on Codeberg.

🎥 Demo

💻 exporter via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

So orthogonal artifact 1 of (maybe) 3 for reimplementing (a subset of) Observable in userspace is done (exporter). The next thing, as discussed in the demo, is to preserve the editing experience by adding a userspace code editor, so that the exported, unbundled (offline-first) notebook carries its own editor around with it.

Progress is pretty good. It ends up a little different to Observable as it is pinned to a specific cell, but it can also do extra things like edit the variables in dependancies which is what you want when the export format has bundled all the dependancies. You might need to change them too!

The third required project, I thought of while preparing for the demo, is the notebook renderer itself. That should also be in userspace and hackable. Even with the editor component, you can't reorder cells, as there is a whole presentation layer that lives above the runtime that chooses how to render the results. That rendering process itself needs to be hackable, so you can leave the vertical notebook format entirely. Currently the single file format follows the path of the existing observable runtime of instantiating the DOM before starting the runtime and piping observations to the DOM, but for maximum control we should let userspace be informed of the runtime changes and choose how to render. Just a shower thought at the moment but I definitely think the "renderer" should be another orthogonal component.

I am trying to document my learnings about the Observable system in some reference documentation here if you want to learn more. That documentation actually hacks the runtime so the concepts are explained adjacent to the actually executing concepts. I love literate programming.

aside: I am enjoying the single file hermetic webpage format, its like portable statically linked binary that ends up being way faster than normal webpages.

💬 Jason Morris

🧵 conversation

I'm doing one weird stuff with knowledge graphs in my "real job", and it is sufficiently weird that I am finding that my intuitions about what's going on in the graph are dramatically incorrect, and I don't have any comprehension of how wrong I am until after I select a random collection of nodes, and visualize them somehow. The degree to which this is a pain in the ass compared to using other data structures is wild. You just cannot usefully inspect a graph in text. Are there some tricks of the trade I'm missing, here?

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I've been watching my wife teach the kids second-grade math for a few weeks now with the glimmer of an idea in my head that just came out.

The tree notation for addition and subtraction shows the symmetry between them, and also the symmetry between operands.

I know it's valuable, because it got instantly adopted in lessons, where most of my ideas get gently humored and booted out of the room.

I'd never have the sense something like this was valuable before hanging out here ❤

Thinking Together

📝 github.com/bellard/quickjs via John Flockton

🧵 conversation

Hey folks! Bit of a random question, but can any one think of any language interpreters which parse text straight to bytecode, omitting the AST step completely? Quick.js is one of the most well-known (github.com/bellard/quickjs/tree/master) but I wondered if any one knew of any other interesting examples for other languages?

Content

🎥 ABI-DOS Announcement Trailer via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's a lil circuit simulation game that looks pretty neat — ABI-DOS

EDIT: Ended up collecting a handful of these.

📝 Viewing document history is now easy as scrubbing through a video. via Mattia Fregola

🧵 conversation

Pretty great thing I wish I had through life:

Viewing document history is now easy as scrubbing through a video.

Usable on lex.page

📃 Feels Like Paper via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Some lovely explorations of physical paper + augmented reality in this project Feels Like Paper from Lukas Moro

🎥 Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

What machines want, by @Dave Ackley. The subtitle " Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing " is more informative. It's about building computing systems that remain robust under scale.

🎥 Handmade Cities via misha

🧵 conversation

We are the largest indie conferences for low-level programmers. This is your portal to meet with folks into graphics, game engines, kernels, compilers, and more!

🎥 UIST'09: Bonfire: a nomadic system for hybrid laptop-tabletop interaction via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

📝 Oliver Kreylos' Research and Development Homepage - Augmented Reality Sandbox via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

Augmented Reality Sandbox

The goal of this project was to develop a real-time integrated augmented reality system to physically create topography models which are then scanned into a computer in real time, and used as background for a variety of graphics effects and simulations. The final product is supposed to be self-contained to the point where it can be used as a hands-on exhibit in science museums with little supervision.

🎥 WUW / sixthsense - a wearable gestural interface via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

'WUW' bridges this gap by augmenting the physical world around us with digital information and proposing natural hand gestures as the mechanism to interact with that information. 'WUW' brings the intangible information out into the tangible world. By using a camera and a tiny projector mounted on a hat or coupled in a pendant like device, 'WUW' sees what you see and visually augments any surfaces or objects you are interacting with. 'WUW' projects information to any surface, walls, and the objects around us, and to interact with the information through natural hand gestures, arm movements, or with the object itself.

📝 Bret Victor on climate change via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Rereading Bret Victor on climate change, it finally sunk in that he really really cares about software tools for scientific computing.

I’m happy to endorse Julia because, well, it’s just about the only example of well-grounded academic research in technical computing. It’s the craziest thing. I’ve been following the programming language community for a decade, I’ve spoken at SPLASH and POPL and Strange Loop, and it’s only slightly an unfair generalization to say that almost every programming language researcher is working on (a) languages and methods for software developers, (b) languages for novices or end-users, (c) implementation of compilers or runtimes, or (d) theoretical considerations, often of type systems. The very concept of a “programming language” originated with languages for scientists — now such languages aren’t even part of the discussion! Yet they remain the tools by which humanity understands the world and builds a better one. If we can provide our climate scientists and energy engineers with a civilized computing environment, I believe it will make a very significant difference. But not one that is easily visible or measured!

Music

📝 Orbita – a new device from Playtronica via Tak Tran

🧵 conversation

Coloured dots for making a sequencer - the same company are making a MIDI controller using plants too

Turn color and gesture into music with Orbita - a new device in Playtronica’s range of quirky sound gadgets

🎥 Virtual Meetup 7 • November 27, 2024 via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's the recording of the Future of Coding Virtual Meetup 7. This time, I added some notes and timestamps to the description, just in case that's helpful.

For next month, we'll have to figure out something a little different so we don't collide uncomfortably with the holiday season. TBD!

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

💬 Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

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🧑🏽‍💻 Notebook Demos 🔌 Node & Wires Demos 📺 Democratizing Software ☃️ Dynamic Language Winter is Coming?

Two Minute Week

💬 Taylor Troesh

🧵 conversation

working on a local-first podcast client for video podcasts and youtube rss :)

🎥 Dragging and dropping values on edges in code flow canvas via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

Thanks to Ivan Reese for coming up with the idea and putting it in my head: I've added a new feature to code flow canvas.. you can now drag and drop arbitrary values which are on the canvas on edges (or use the clipboard). I've made a small video about and you can see it here . Off course you can try it yourself on demo.codeflowcanvas.io

Our Work

📡 public.me/anton via Anton Podviaznikov

🧵 conversation

made micro blogging tool(twitter replacements) that works using imessage.

allows publishing things through imessage without consuming tons of tweets first. the bonus is that all my data is on my devices anyway.

here is my micro blog public.me/anton

📝 Research manifesto via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

Yesterday I revised my home page and added a section "Research manifesto". It's mostly about my ideas for FoSC (Future of Scientific Computing), so I feel it fits here.

🎥 LLM chat assistant in code flow canvas via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

I've made a new small video where I've implemented a chat assistant using the OpenAI Chat Completion API in Code flow canvas (this is the visual programming system that I am building in my spare time). Goals for building this visual flow are to learn more about the OpenAI API's and LLM's in general, but also to see if something like this could be build without building in special knowledge about OpenAI in code flow canvas itself. I had to extend code flow canvas off course, but only with generic node-types which could be used in this flow. You can try it our yourself on demo.codeflowcanvas.io, but only if you have an OpenAI API key with some credits

🎥 Reverse Engineering a 218-Byte Wasm Compiler in JavaScript via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

Reverse Engineering a 218-Byte Wasm Compiler in JavaScript

Starting with a 218-byte one-liner that implements a Reverse Polish Notation arithmetic compiler, we'll work backward to transform it into readable JS by removing one code golf trick at a time

Devlog Together

📝 the lab notebook entry via Tom Lieber

🧵 conversation

I finished the lab notebook entry that my earlier posts were about. 🙂 I was burnt out on the ugly charts I was making before, and the outcome of this experiment with schematic tables is: I am pumped to keep going!!

📝 Building Software Using Black Boxes via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

I've been experimenting and thinking about just how little we need to worry about "efficiency" these days, and how to expand the gamut of notations for programming. A snapshot of my thoughts... Building Software Using Black Boxes

📝 my notebook app via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I haven't really felt like building in a while, but there's a cricket match on and today I felt moved to use my notebook app to create a little scenario calculator for the world championship.

This requires LÖVE (basically some way to draw pixels on a canvas) and 2.8kLoC of Lua. Compare Excel, or Google sheets + a web browser, or Jupyter. Much fewer features, of course, but well-sized for things like this. Though I did find myself wishing I could sort lines, the notebook doesn't support that yet..

🗒️ wtc

📊 A small update via Tom Lieber

🧵 conversation

A small update today: I draped flags onto the bar charts so that you can answer "how do the observations affect the priors?" with a glance.

📝 thinking ahead via Pietu

🧵 conversation

Hi again 👋.

Continuing my journey on building an experimental markup language based on blocks.

Someone was already 💬 #devlog-together@2024-11-16 last week and suggested that blocks should be executable.

I've got now the bare minimum demo of executing inline code embedded in markup documents.

🎥 Murkdown exec blocks

📝 draw.io via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

brainstorming: In what I'm writing these days, I want to include lots of diagrams / figures. Currently, I'm using Apple Pages and just drag'n'dropping screenshots into documents then publishing them to Substack (a painful process). I happen to use draw.io and excalidraw for diagramming. For a while, I was using markdown editors, but they didn't give me a WYSIWYG editing experience. I used Obsidian for a while - it did give me WYSIWYG for excalidraw diagrams, but wanted $$$s to allow me use their publishing mechanism and made it difficult to use Github Pages for $-less publishing. I keep thinking that I should just cobble together an RTF parser and use only a markdown-ish subset of features in Apple's RTF editors, but, I don't want to get side-tracked [I would use 't2t' to parse and transmogrify RTF, I think, and, use it to transpile subsetted-RTF to markdown - what's needed is an RTF-to-markdown or RTF-to-murkdown tool, I think]

Thinking Together

💬 Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

What do you think of "It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures."?

If you agree, what is that data structure for you?

📝 Bret Victor's PROCESS via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Bret Victor's PROCESS

💬 Alex McLean

🧵 conversation

Love this (partly) analogue modular live coding system for 3d printing by Maas Goudswaard

Content

🦕 Reactive HTML notebooks via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Content editable Observable runtime based notebooks 🤔 Pretty cool!

🎥 MIT Theory of Computation, Fall 2020 via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

🔑 Foundation DB Query Language via Taylor Troesh

🧵 conversation

My friend made a query language for KV stores! Already being used on very large production datasets. Check it out:

📺 Democratizing Software - Handmade Seattle 2024 via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

"Democratizing Software" Talk at Handmade Seattle, starting at 1:24. Starts out with a statement of goals and values, as the title suggests, and then explains why rewriting techniques are a good way to reach those goals. Ends with a presentation of Nova, a rewriting system for nearly-plain-language.

This is so incredibly similar to my own work over the last years that I am probably going to rewatch this at least once. The only difference is the target audience: Wryl (the speaker) uses everyday language as a building material, addressing games and other use cases that everyone can relate to, whereas I use mathematics as a building block, addressing scientists. I could probably set up a rewriting system for translating their talk to my own scenario.

💬 Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

Konrad Hinsen I haven't watched this yet, but the words you use are tickling my neurons.

1. "rewriting"

2. makes me think that this may be incredibly similar to my t2t ("text to text" rewriting)

3. "a rewriting system for nearly-plain-language"

4. makes me think of Steve Phillips' work with ChatGPT / Claude. He used LLMs to generate OhmJS. The generated OhmJS implemented his new programming language by using Golang as an assembler. It mapped his new language into legal Go code that he would run. I.e. new-lang -> new-age assembler -> executable, where new-age assembler == Go. (Private communication, details available, the only blocker is writing this up in a readable manner)

5. I'm currently using Python as an assembler in defining an HHLL and am compiling a 1,400 LOC HHLL program (into Python [done] and am working on generating Common Lisp, with an eye on generating JS).
6. Kinopio to markdown. I use the Kinopio app as a mind mapping / bubble-charting / brainstorming device. I invoke a Prolog program to rearrange the mind map in hierarchical order and to spit out the points as markdown (.md). I told ChatGPT to turn the point-form .md file into full-blown prose and generated at least one blog post in English that way.

(Details and repos available, if interested).

☃️ Are we Heading Towards a Dynamic Language Winter? via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

🧑‍🔬 Open positions at the College of the Atlantic via Eli Mellen

🧵 conversation

A potentially future of coding shaped CS prof. role is available at COA up on MDI in Maine

I can talk to what the school is like and make intros if anyone is interested.

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

💬 Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

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🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

🎥 A New Kind of Spatial Computer 📘 Live Coding: A User's Manual 🎥 Single File Notebooks

Two Minute Week

💬 Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

Developing without a GUI framework comes with a risk of falling into some deep rabbit holes. This one is about exploiting the slowness of some widgets to create a sort of "Into the Spider-Verse" animation effect.

🎥 Export Observable notebooks as single self-sustainable offline files. via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

The self-sustaining single file observable notebook export format is ready and implemented in userspace

Our Work

📝 Dialogues on Natural Code | Proceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software via Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

My first ever proper academic publication!!!!

It's called "Dialogues on Natural Code" — an essay that Dave Ackley and I wrote together

I'd be really grateful if you could give it a read. I promise it's not boring

Also it's a stage play

Devlog Together

🎥 Edited via Paul Tarvydas

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Revelation: I like to think in terms of UNIX pipelines. 0D is like UNIX pipelines, but, 0D is more efficient and 0D allows many more input and output ports in software components. Using UNIX's stdin , stdout and stderr are not enough in the presence of multiple ports. It looks like JSON might fit the bill, though. I know from previous experience that SWIPL (a PROLOG) can cast its results to JSON. I imagine that any modern programming language can produce JSON. I hope to poke at this idea of using JSON instead of using raw, unstructured text like stdout in hopes of creating a cheapo multi-language REPL.

💬 Jason Morris

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Incidentally re-read something I wrote in October of '23, and realized that I am still working on implementing those same thoughts today. The thing I wrote about then has been an evenings and weekends project for me since, and I am hoping to have a version live for people to play with early in the new year. Is 15 months too long to go between releases? 😅

💬 Pietu

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Hi again 👋.

I've recently started a project to try out some of the ideas I've had regarding markdown and writing. The approach i've taken is to implement my own markup language with some interesting properties.

The perspective this time is, "why should a piece of content be represented as one thing". A list is a list, an image is an image, a quote is a quote. Could we somehow compose these to make eg. a "code quote".

This time, i've got a bare-bones video demoing how blocks of content can be composed.

🎥 Murkdown composable blocks

📝 Programming Language Workbench - Beginnings via Paul Tarvydas

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Inspired by my previous REPL experiments, I’ve begun playing around with a more complicated example - a programming language workbench.

💬 Tom Lieber

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The layout in this next prototype is complicated enough that I finally got around to some automatic layout.

💬 Tom Lieber

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A few debug passes, and it renders schematic tables!

Thinking Together

📝 Nilesh Trivedi (@nilesh.trivedi.link) via Nilesh Trivedi

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Somewhat off-topic but I saw a lot of people moving to BlueSky, decided to read up on the underlying AT protocol and its promise of decentralization and found things I did not like. Posted some thoughts.

💬 Sam Gentle

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Random thought about Things Spreadsheets Got Right – I've heard a lot about "no invisible state" etc, but another interesting thing about spreadsheets is that they treat data as a first-class citizen in a way that most programming models don't.

In a conventional programming language, you model processes and leave the data implicit; in a spreadsheet, you model data and the processes are implicit. The data is what you see in the cells, and the processes are plumbing that you only see by inspecting the cell that the data lives in. What other programming systems start with the data you want to process before you write the process itself?

And maybe spreadsheet programming's lack of implicit state is actually a consequence of this data-first paradigm, rather than an end in itself. In fact, even calling data "state" implies a kind of process-first mindset, only conceptualising data through its relation to a process. And this could be a key blind spot for programmers creating systems for non-programmers, or rather process-first people creating systems for data-first people.

Content

🤖 AI Makes Tech Debt More Expensive via Steve Dekorte

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I've been thinking a lot about this in the last 6 months and ran across this today: 📝 AI Makes Tech Debt More Expensive

AI increases the penalty for low quality code

🎥 A New Kind of Spatial Computer via Taylor Troesh

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spatialpixel.com

📘 Live Coding: A User's Manual via Lu Wilson

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Lots of nuggets of wisdom in this book about live coding

📝 Live Coding: A User's Manual

Live Coding: A User's Manual, published by MIT Press

Present Company

📝 Modo End of life extended license via Ivan Reese

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If anyone wants a free production-grade 3D modelling/animation/rendering tool, the venerable Modo just got end-of-life'd and the company is giving everyone a free 10-year license.

Sure, Blender exists — but for us HCI-inclined folks this is a rare opportunity to casually check out how a different team approached this corner of the GUI possibility space. I personally find 3D modelling tools to be hugely inspirational, and frequently draw on my experiences with them when designing programming systems. If you've never kicked the tires on one of these, or only have experience with Blender, CAD, or game engines, Modo is a really interesting point of comparison.

EOL announcement and free license: campaigns.foundry.com/modo-eol-license

Download (requires a free account): foundry.com/products/modo/download

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

🎙️ Hest — The Podcast 🦋 Future of Coding Meetup & Starter Pack 🧑‍💻 inside the head of a J programmer

Our Work

📝 It takes a collective to raise an idea via Mariano Guerra

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I wrote: It takes a collective to raise an idea

You may know about Alan Turing or John von Neumann, but what about John Vincent Atanasoff or Konrad Zuse?

Devlog Together

📝 Beginning to Work On a REPL for Drawware via Paul Tarvydas

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Exploring / fooling around with making a REPL for drawware (inspired by Ivan Reese’s reference to the paper Advanced Game Engine Wizardry for Visual Programming Environments.

Surprising revelation: On the same computer, using just a websocket to connect a browser-based GUI to a Python program which interprets the diagram by shelling out results in turn-around that is "fast enough". It looks instantaneous. No further optimization, nor premature optimization, is required. Biggest missing feature at this point: a change to the diagram should cause the Python program to recompile and re-run the diagram and to update the output fields on the GUI. I think that this could be done by having the Python program periodically sample the 'test.drawio' file timestamp. I know that this is possible, but, I haven't worked out the details yet (suggestions welcome).

🎲 probabilistic programming language project via Tom Lieber

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People who were interested in my probabilistic programming language project for the statistics might enjoy this sprawling post where I dig deep into the guts of the surprisingly approachable inference algorithm underlying it:

alltom.com/pages/spawelo

Cool problem ✅

Cool model ✅

Cool algorithms ✅

💬 Pietu

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Hi all 👋.

I've started a project to try out some of the ideas I've had regarding markdown and writing.

The perspective I'm coming from is that I've found it difficult to write technical articles. Especially ones containing code examples. The cut-n-paste nature of building such articles usually results in some files missing, broken code or incorrect output.

I've had a bad habit of not sharing what i'm doing, so this time I want to share baby-steps i'm making with the project. It's very barebones. I've got the first feature (if you permit) working, so the below video demonstrates includable blocks.

🎥 Murkdown example blocks

⏰ for hopefully the final time via Kartik Agaram

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I have gotten annoyed by timezone calculations 💬 #present-company@2024-11-07. Here's a static html page you can download and save locally to roughly compare times in different timezones (just hours; you're on your own for minutes)

• without daylight savings time
• with daylight savings time

The way I'm naively imagining using this:

• Scroll to the timezone you know the time in.
• Click on the nearest hour.
• It'll highlight that column all over the page.

• Scroll or find the timezone you care about.

• If you're not in a whole-number timezone (Hello India), you'll need to do some additional mental arithmetic by comparing nearby rows.

Right now you need to know if you're currently in Daylight Savings Time. Which is often beyond me, but I'm not yet sure what to do about that..

Inspired by Bret Victor, but of course the inevitable mistakes are all mine.

🎙️ Hest — The Podcast via Ivan Reese

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Lately I've felt a lot of "big feelings” — pain, yearning, confusion, frustration, desire — about computer programming.

I can't quite explain how I feel. Certainly can't write it down. Most definitely not in brief.

So I did the only thing that comes naturally: felt my way through it, out loud, exploratively.

Titles are hard, so it's called "Live as in Alive”, perhaps glancing sideways at the recent d-d-discourse about live programming vs live coding.

📝 Experiment With A Simple REPL For A DPL via Paul Tarvydas

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Simple REPL for a DPL including a file watcher.

Towards Higher Level Syntax for Programming Languages

Thinking Together

📝 The Future of Programming via Paul Tarvydas

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For discussion...The face of hardware is vastly different than it was in the 1950s and as it was in the early days of computer-ing, when concepts like programming languages and operating systems were invented. I think that this means re-imagining how we use what we've got, instead of just tweaking what we've got. It augments the meaning of "programming". To start things off, here are some thoughts: The Future of Programming

💬 Guyren Howe

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I am quite interested in Event Handlers.

In college, I remember in my languages course discussing how you could have static scope or dynamic scope — whether a non-local identifier is searched for in the scope where the thing being called was defined, or in the scope where it’s being called.

Static won out, because in general it’s easier to reason about.

I mention all this, because I think I understand what Event Handlers are and how they work, and afaict, they’re just “a thing with dynamic scope”.

That all seems fine and good, but I never hear EH being described that way. Maybe because folks have forgotten about dynamic scope?

📝 Thinking about "syntax families", and how to ~categorize them via Jared Forsyth

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I've put together some thoughts about syntax, they're pretty roughly defined at the moment, but I'd love to get your feedback!

📝 Single-Paradigm vs. Multi-Paradigm Thinking (Slight Return) via Paul Tarvydas

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Thinking about multi-paradigm programming. Why FP isn't enough, IMO...

Managing Programming Complexity

Content

📝 One way to do applied research via Patrick Dubroy

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Hello! I just published this blog post which is relevant to folks here:

One way to do applied research

🧑‍💻 ShareMyScreen puts you inside the head of a J programmer as they write a program. via Mariano Guerra

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🟧 automat.org @ HN via Maikel van de Lisdonk

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Automat on hacker news .. awesome @Marek Rogalski !!

🌲 best way to visualize / explore nested data structures via Gregor

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adding onto my post over at bsky:

I'm curious, what is the best way to visualize / explore nested data structures you have seen?

📝 Gregor (@watwa.re)

The core thesis of my new programming environment is once again: we can do better than text

Ironically enough I still dumped its AST (for lack of a better word) as pretty printed JSON. I could not handle that irony, so here's my shot at beating pretty JSON for looking at nested data structures

💬 Maikel van de Lisdonk

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Here's the date for our next online FoC meetup: wednesday 27 nov 16:00 UTC.. and we have at least one demo already from Kartik Agaram , so we need 2 more. If you want to demo then please react in this thread.

🕸️ wiki.futureofcoding.org/meetups via Maikel van de Lisdonk

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I created a wiki page for our meetups wiki.futureofcoding.org/meetups .. if anyone organises an offline FoC meetup, this also can be placed there (or online FoC meetup by other people of the community off course). If you need help with this, please let me know.

🦋 Future of Coding - Community via Gregor

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My BlueSky has a distinct lack of your faces (and thoughts), I tried to collect as many of you into this pack as I could find, but I'd be happy to add more: 🦋 Future of Coding - Community

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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