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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/08 Week 4

2025-08-24 22:14

๐Ÿ—ƒ๏ธ Grist: Organize your data, your way ๐Ÿ’ก Icepath: a 2D Programming Language ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป Alpaca 2025: Algorithmic Patterns in the Creative Arts

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Alex McLean: ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป Alpaca 2025: Algorithmic Patterns in the Creative Arts

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-23

Alpaca festival and conference on algorithmic patterns in the creative arts In-person talks+workshops+concerts+algorave in Sheffield, much of which will be streamed online, from 12-14th September 2025

Then continuing as on-line conference into the following weekend, with in-person watch parties/hubs in Barcelona, Berlin, Linz and Sheffield

Features a fair amount of live coding, including a paper from the mysterious 'pastagang' Full info and line-up/schedule:

2025.algorithmicpattern.org

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Scott: ๐Ÿ“ Safe Is What We Call Things Later

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-24

Wrote a little followup to the post from last week based on the conversation with Jonathan Frederickson and D. Schmudde: ๐Ÿ“ Safe Is What We Call Things Later

Some Software Engineering Folklore

Safe Is What We Call Things Later

DevLog Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ezhik:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-18

Making a little Obsidian plugin that lets you cook small apps right inside of your vault.

I find boilerplate annoying for little experiments, so I got rid of all of it. Each file is a standalone little app that automatically gets built and executed. Data persistence is also usually a pain, so it's nice to be able to just do it HyperCard style and have changes auto-save right to the file.

๐ŸŽฅ Screen Recording

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Kartik Agaram:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-18

I add a feature and add a toggle of state for it. Then I add another feature and add another toggle. Do I really need to handle 4 possible states now, or just 3, i.e. I have an enum in disguise ๐Ÿฅธ? I keep making this mistake. Designing things up front is easy, but I find it impossible to reliably avoid mistakes when adding to an existing design.

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Christopher Shank: ๐ŸŽฅ My Favourite Games from GMTK Game Jam 2025

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-18

The theme of the GMTK Gam Jam was "loops" and there are lots of fun and novel explorations of affordances, interactions, and mechanics that feel applicable to the types of stuff explored here

๐ŸŽฅ My Favourite Games from GMTK Game Jam 2025

My Favourite Games from GMTK Game Jam 2025

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-24

Anyone have experience with XSLT? The recent kerfuffle about removing it from the html spec and the episode of Igalia Chats about it were both quite interesting to me. A declarative tree-transformation language!? Sounds like the sort of thing you could build a web app engine around ;)

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Pablo Donato: ๐Ÿ—ƒ๏ธ Grist: Organize your data, your way

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-18

Not sure if it was already shared here before, but Grist looks like a good contender in the No Code/Relational Spreadsheet game. It seems to be to Airtable what Zulip is to Slack: an open-source, self-hostable, and more customizable alternative.

Learn about all of Grist's powerful spreadsheet-database product and its many features.

Product | Grist

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Eli:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-20

Ends in what is likely a fun question for these parts:

In the 1970s, you could launch a new language with a paper and a maybe a compiler and/or interpreter. In 2025, you need an integrated product, a narrative, and enough momentum to bootstrap an ecosystem and on top of that a huge corpus of code that can only be created through sustained use. Modern langdev is daunting to say the least.

Where do languages go from here?

  • Languages could be shaped by physical and purpose-specific constraints once again. Tomorrowโ€™s interesting languages may target IoT, SBCs, edge devices, Blockchain, GPUs, and letโ€™s not forget that the world still runs on microcontrollers.
  • Python is the lingua franca of AI, which means itโ€™s the lingua franca of LLM-generated code. Eventually Python will force LLMs to eat their own tail, but more immediate an over-reliance on AI-generated code will expose inherent weaknesses in the technology. Weโ€™re seeing real problems with an increased lack of rigor and there are novel problems that LLMs simply cannot solve. These short-comings are opportunities.
  • Future innovations may look more like a new operating environment with integrated semantics across distributed systems, or programmable infrastructure that blurs the line between language and runtime.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jon Tran: Open-source geometric constraint solver

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-21

A while back, when I saw the Inkling presentation I said that my company was working on designing a constraint solving system for CAD. It's just getting started and still very much a work in progress, but it's happening. https://github.com/KittyCAD/ezpz

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Konrad Hinsen: ๐Ÿ“ Google is killing the open web

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-22

A statement I frequently hear is that no platform is as stable as the Web platform, because everyone makes an effort to keep old Web sites functional. The current XSLT debate suggests that this stability may soon end, as part of another enshittification campaign.

๐Ÿ“ Google is killing the open web

The juggernaut is taking advantage of its dominant position to enclose and destroy the commons.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jimmy Miller: ๐Ÿ’ก Icepath: a 2D Programming Language

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-23

https://healeycodes.com/icepath-a-2d-programming-language

A little 2D programming language called Icepath. Named after the ice puzzles in Pokรฉmon Gold and Silver. The vibe I was going for was sliding around a cave and hitting opcodes.


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/08 Week 3

2025-08-17 23:33

๐Ÿ›ธ A moldable Common Lisp object inspector ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ”ฌ Trying out "Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning" ๐Ÿ“„ Hierarchical File Systems are Dead

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas: ๐Ÿ“ De-Spaghettifying Control Flow & ๐Ÿ“ Towards Asynchronous Programming Workflows and Languages

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-11

In my mind, CPUs implement subroutines, and, "functions" are but artificial constructs built on top of subroutines. Here are some more attempts to explain this hardware-centric view (see, also, the playlist of short videos in the first article).

๐Ÿ“ De-Spaghettifying Control Flow

๐Ÿ“ Towards Asynchronous Programming Workflows and Languages

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Robin Heggelund Hansen:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-12

I'm working on a language called Glรธgg, which is a fully declarative, relational language where the source code is stored in a sqlite3 database as AST.

I now just got vite support and (proof of concept) dom integration working.

I'll be doing a whole presentation on Glรธgg at the upcoming JavaZone conference (september 3-4).

๐ŸŽฅ glogg

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Scott: ๐Ÿ“ The System Inside the System

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-17

I've been thinking about the Viable System Model as a framework for AI agents since I came across it, mentioned it here actually: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1748381760844169

Finally put together some rubygems to explore it - vsm the framework and airb a CLI-based agent built with it and wrote up some more detailed thoughts about them on my newsletter:

๐Ÿ“ The System Inside the System

Announcing two new Ruby gems: vsm and airb

The System Inside the System

DevLog Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Konrad Hinsen: ๐Ÿ›ธ A moldable Common Lisp object inspector based on CLOG

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-11

I finally implemented dataflow-based reactive views for my moldable inspector for Common Lisp. It's much shorter than the limited input handling I had before, and also more versatile. I am working on a demonstration/example, stay tuned...

There seem to be two widely used dataflow implementations for Common Lisp, out of which I picked the simple one (https://github.com/kchanqvq/lwcells) over the complex one (https://github.com/kennytilton/cells).

In the process, I ran into my first experience with ambiguities in the Common Lisp specification, with one of my new indirect dependencies.

clog-moldabl-inspector

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Joel Neely:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-17

  • The clean way that the if/fi and do/od constructs embraced non-determinism still looks cleaner to me than the contemporary toolkits of various mainstream languages and frameworks.

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-11

Let's have a discussion that'll hopefully generate lots of links.

Microsoft have just placed GitHub under AI in their org chart.

If I don't want to stick around and find out what fresh hell comes next, where should I go instead? Gitlab? Codeberg? Sourceforge? Send me links to your favourite social network for git repos!

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Bill Mill:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-12

a semi-related opinion that I donโ€™t want to clutter that thread with:

self-hosting is awful* and thereโ€™s a big opportunity to develop structures for community-hosting things like git forges, chat servers, &c. Spread the load and develop social experience for sharing resources

*: too much work for too little use, too expensive, nobody wants to be on the hook all the time for maintenance so it rots

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Chris Knott:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-13

I thought I would hate this paper (Hierarchical File Systems Are Dead) because I actually zealously love the hierarchical directory metaphor and hate the modern broth of files approach. In fact it is basically neutral on the user facing metaphor, recognises the necessity of replicating posix if anything will ever get traction, and is overall very good.

More like - how do we reify semantic search and tagging to the lowest level of the OS

๐Ÿ“„ Hierarchical File Systems are Dead

AI

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Tom Larkworthy: ๐Ÿ“ Trying out "GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning"

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-12

I completed a toy setup of GEPA with some fricken good results! I am very happy to have a methodology that removes some of the guess work with prompt design. Its a really simple algorithm that orchestrates a genetic evolution where the mutation operator is asking a LLM to improve the prompt based on the diagnostic trace your evals. So simple! I also enabled websearch during reflection so it can actually do its research when improving the prompt. This means it would adapt the web documentation to suit the prompt format automatically. Very good, been looking for something like this and it did not disappoint.

๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ”ฌ Trying out "GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning"

Trying out "GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning"

Present Company

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-12

We still have nobody offering to demo this month at the weirdly timed meetup (North American Tuesday Evening, or NATE). If nobody volunteers I'll have to get weird with the format. We need your help to make sure that doesn't happen: ๐Ÿ‘‰ Call Now ๐Ÿ‘ˆ


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/08 Week 2

2025-08-10 22:54

๐Ÿ”Œ Spirit Plant Software and Network Architecture ๐ŸŽฅ Virtual Meetup 13 โ€ข July 2025 ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ”ฌ Notes from the Lab

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-06

reading When Leggett post caused me to write this article

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Marcin Ignac: ๐Ÿ”Œ Spirit Plant Software and Network Architecture: a technical case study

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-07

We have just published an in depth case study about our last generative (non genAI) art installation. All JS + WebGL baby! Check it out Spirit Plant Software and Network Architecture: a technical case study. ยท Variable - new ways of experiencing data | https://variable.io

We used web technologies to power the Spirit Plant installation visuals in real-time.

Spirit Plant Software and Network Architecture: a technical case study. ยท Variable - new ways of experiencing data | https://variable.io

DevLog Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Christopher Shank: ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ”ฌ Notes from the Lab - June & July 2025

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-09

Latest notes about what we've been working on with the folkjs project. Explorations include DOM sync, Desktop Interlay via Accessibility Trees, DOM interactions and instruments, HTML pipes, HTML attributes for syntax highlighting, LSPs, and reordering lists, and much more!

Notes from the Lab - June & July 2025

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Joel Neely:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-09

I hadnโ€™t thought about your before-and-after interpretation in quite that way. Iโ€™ll have to ponder a bit.
Regarding your reference to determinism, only some constructions in EWDโ€™s wp-based notation are deterministic! While some cases (e.g. x := x-y) are, EWDโ€™s reasoning makes some kinds of determinism a not-very-interesting special case. The โ€œAha!โ€ moment for me was his solution for max in c := a max b.

if  
   a >= b -> c := a  
[]  
   b >= a -> c :- b  
fi

In the (again, uninteresting) special case that a = b, both guards are true it is perfectly valid to โ€œperformโ€ either of the two guarded commands.

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jasmine Otto: ๐Ÿ•น๏ธ too many gamedevs and only one game

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-04

ahaha, multiplayer bitsy in the wild at A MAZE (using MouseMux)

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-06

Prof Eric Hehner's April 2025 article on interpreting the Halting Problem:
https://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~hehner/Boxes.pdf

๐Ÿ“ท image.png

AI

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jason Morris:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-07

Happy GPT-5 day to those who celebrate. I got to play with it at work a bit, and it is impressive. I think having the AI generate symbolic representations of facts in text is going to be a lot more feasible going forward, which is going to be a game changer for people who can figure out how to use it.

Present Company

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese: ๐ŸŽฅ Virtual Meetup 13 โ€ข July 2025

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-07

Here's the video from last week's virtual meetup.

Virtual Meetup 13 โ€ข July 2025

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-07

I'd like to try planting (yes, like a plant that'll grow) the next virtual meetup at a different time, so that we can shake things up and bring out some folks who normally can't attend.

If we were to schedule it at 01:00 UTC Aug 27th (conversions: everytimezone, time.is) โ€” so think evening of wednesday the 26th for north america, morning of the 26th for eastern asia โ€” would you be stoked to attend? to present? give a ๐Ÿ‘ on the post if you'd come, and if you might present, post a threaded reply!

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Maikel: ๐Ÿ—“๏ธ FoC Meetup ยท Luma

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-08

This month's FoC meetup is on a different time to enable other timezone's to more easily attend, here's the luma link: https://lu.ma/3olgtwn1 ๐Ÿ˜Ž

๐Ÿ“ FoC Meetup ยท Luma

Information about our meetup can be found here : https://futureofcoding.org/meetups

FoC Meetup ยท Luma


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/08 Week 1

2025-08-03 23:31

๐ŸŽฅ Bubble Menu ๐Ÿ’ก Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs ๐ŸŽฅ Vibe coding a choropleth map in Observable Notebooks 2.0

Two Minute Week

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ maf: ๐ŸŽฅ Bubble Menu ๐ŸŽฎ๐Ÿ’ป AUTOMAT DEVLOG 13

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-30

Some context for the context menu:

๐ŸŽฅ Bubble Menu ๐ŸŽฎ๐Ÿ’ป AUTOMAT DEVLOG 13

Bubble Menu ๐ŸŽฎ๐Ÿ’ป AUTOMAT DEVLOG 13

DevLog Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-28

Spent the weekend playing with claude code for my first nontrivial thing.

It's pretty wild. It feels so much like working with a super green junor dev. A lot of the same coaching strategies seem to apply well. Also, I'd forgotten how it's kinda fun to teach good debugging practices!

One major difference โ€” I tend to hit the context window limit after about an hour, and have to start up a new session (because compaction sucks), which means I (seemingly) need to do a bunch of coaching to make sure claude is always externalizing its "thought" process to files so that the next agent can pick up where it left off. This sucks, or I just haven't figured out a good foolproof way to do it.

The nontrivial thing โ€” I'm making a new version of my depth camera, but using gaussian splatting. So I'm using this as an opportunity to: * learn claude code * learn gaussian splatting * learn more swift

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Eli:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-01

My 3rd act reveal is that the future of coding is actually awk

, skwak

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Kartik Agaram:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-02

This might be premature, but I think I finally understand Dijkstra's approach to deriving programs from post-conditions in "A Discipline of Programming". I've had this book on my bookshelf for almost 20 years, never understood it but also never quite worked up the will to toss it out. (For context, I only own like a dozen books over the long term.)

Concretely, I've made it to the end of Chapter 7. I feel like I understand every bit up until this point.

Parts of Chapter 6 and 7 feel very sloppily written! And this is Dijkstra! So either my leaps of interpretation are only leaps because I'm missing something, or my sense of understanding is an illusion ๐Ÿ˜…

Has anyone here made it this far and feel like they understood it? I'd love to talk to you.

Incidentally: I wouldn't have made it in even this my probably 4th attempt, if it wasn't for LLMs. They're better than a rubber duck for talking things over with! It's amazing that they can all converse intelligently about the Dijkstra method, and all I need to do is mention wp or wdec. Or I know nothing and am incapable of judging anything about this book.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Mihai:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-02

Seems like the message from the Better Software Conference is that the future of programming should be: simple, low level ( aka fast ), imperative, data-oriented ( not oop ) coding. I kind of like itโ€ฆ Started working in C again for some personal projects, and I enjoy it.

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Mariano Guerra: ๐ŸŽฅ Vibe coding a choropleth map in Observable Notebooks 2.0

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-29

Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

๐ŸŽฅ Vibe coding a choropleth map in Observable Notebooks 2.0

Vibe coding a choropleth map in Observable Notebooks 2.0

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jasmine Otto:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-31

pipeline synthesis via domain-specific visual programming. obviously they're over-claiming ('generate any stable, isolable molecule') as chemists, but as a PL person this sounds great! if you're a constructivist getting into assembly theory, I think this was written for us

Linking this framework to assembly theory strengthens the definition of a molecule by demanding practical synthesizability and error correction becomes a prerequisite for universality.

๐Ÿฆ‹ leecronin.bsky.social:

Making digital chemistry truly universal for chemputation (digital control of chemsitry) required a new approach to hardware, wetware, & software with the development of XDL. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav2211 Now the theory showing universality is done. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09171

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-02

sapphirepunk โ€“ an alternative to cypherpunk, via Christopher Shank

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ misha:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-02

https://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax links and demos of structural/visual code editors https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/main/README.md

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Denny Vrandeฤiฤ‡: ๐Ÿ“‘ Gallery of programming UIs

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-02

That links to the Gallery of programming UIs, but the link there seems dead (and the Internet Archive is no help): https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1068 --- does anyone have a copy?

๐Ÿ“ Gallery of programming UIs

Iโ€™ve assembled a gallery of notable/interesting user interfaces for programming, as inspiration for the next Subtext. [Google Slides]

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jack Rusher:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-03

https://blog.brownplt.org/2025/08/03/paralegal.html Something for our community of computational law enthusiasts. ๐Ÿ™‚

AI

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi: ๐Ÿ’ก Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-28

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Tom Larkworthy: ๐Ÿ“ DSPy

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-08-03

Just came across https://dspy.ai/ while researching GEPA. Seems to be a very flexible and programmable "LLMs as code" runtime. Sort of a functional abstraction over LLMs. Its got some very good credentials using it, it allowed things like optimising the prompt.

๐Ÿ“ DSPy

The framework for programmingโ€”rather than promptingโ€”language models.

๐Ÿ“” GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted to downstream tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which often require thousands of rollouts to learn new tasks. We argue that the interpretable nature of language can often provide a much richer learning medium for LLMs, compared with policy gradients derived from sparse, scalar rewards. To test this, we introduce GEPA (Genetic-Pareto), a prompt optimizer that thoroughly incorporates natural language reflection to learn high-level rules from trial and error. Given any AI system containing one or more LLM prompts, GEPA samples system-level trajectories (e.g., reasoning, tool calls, and tool outputs) and reflects on them in natural language to diagnose problems, propose and test prompt updates, and combine complementary lessons from the Pareto frontier of its own attempts. As a result of GEPA's design, it can often turn even just a few rollouts into a large quality gain. Across four tasks, GEPA outperforms GRPO by 10% on average and by up to 20%, while using up to 35x fewer rollouts. GEPA also outperforms the leading prompt optimizer, MIPROv2, by over 10% across two LLMs, and demonstrates promising results as an inference-time search strategy for code optimization.


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/07 Week 4

2025-07-28 00:27

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ FoC 77 โ€ข As We May Think by Vannevar Bush ๐Ÿ“„ Boxer: A Teacher's Experience ๐ŸŽ›๏ธ Frame of preference

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese: ๐ŸŽ™๏ธ F----- o- C----- โ€ข Episode 77 โ€ข As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-22

[I've had this episode finished and ready to publish for like 2 months now, ugh! Sorry it's so late. Yeah, this was recorded back in, like, April(?) when we were deep in the "rename the community" discussion. Sigh.]

We're trying to switch it up a bit between "classics" like this month's paper, more recent work (like the prior, and the next episode โ€” already recorded and releasing soon dammit โ€” a preprint, so fresh), and maybe some weirder things. If there's stuff you think we should read that's relatively short (ideally less than 20 pages), well-written, and arguably relevant (the more "arguably" the better I say!) then I'd love to know about it.

No, I'm not going to talk about the content of the episode. Everyone knows it, surely. Surely! Surโ€ฆ fine.

As We May Think was written in the 1940s and, worried about the surge of information complexity in the modern world, imagines how advancements to present technology would allow for the creation of a special machine, dubbed the "memex", that bears a striking resemblance to the Personal Computer of the 80s and later. This paper is often referenced as a good starting point for folks beginning their journey into deeply understanding and reimagining the computer. It's historically significant, it suggests a bit of alt-history, and (rule of 3s) it does other stuff too!

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ TodePond: ๐ŸŽฅ You can do collab strudel with flok.cc it's a lot of fun

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-25

hello i gave a talk about a new live programming language called strudel

๐ŸŽฅ You can do collab strudel with flok.cc it's a lot of fun

You can do collab strudel with flok.cc it's a lot of fun

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Laura Brekelmans:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-26

I started a Discord for people who're interested in communal computing/dynamicland specifically for people in the Netherlands (and Belgium, I suppose!)

If you happen to be from the lower lands, let me know

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-23

Inspiration from today's demo meetup: Nilesh Trivedi casually tossed out the idea that there are 2 kinds of edges between software units: edge (visible line) and containment (invisible(?), but, easy to calculate using bounding boxes). I think that containment is important, but, I've been avoiding it because I could only think of complicated ways to represent it. If it's "just" an edge, then the problem is solved ๐Ÿคฆ. I've used Prolog (exhaustive search using backtracking) in the past to infer edge information from JSON (SWIPL even knows how to inhale and exhale JSON). Now that backtracking is no longer a verbotten technique (OhmJS, Prolog, miniKanren, Nils Holm's Scheme code & transpilations of that code to other PLs, cl-holm, etc.) it should be straight-forward to create DPLs that use "containment" visual syntax. Hmmm...

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ maf: ๐ŸŽฅ The Most ADVANCED VR Game in the WORLD! [Resonite]

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-23

Resonite (a.k.a. Future of VR, whitepaper, video) has an interesting built-in scripting engine. Probably the most immersive programming environment I've seen. I'll have to dust off my VR headset to try this one out!

๐ŸŽฅ The Most ADVANCED VR Game in the WORLD! [Resonite]

The Most ADVANCED VR Game in the WORLD! [Resonite]

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ curious_reader: ๐Ÿ“ Rick Rubin | The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-25

My quick search hasn't revealed anything so I just wanted to share this here again which a friend mentioned to me today:

https://www.thewayofcode.com/

๐Ÿ“ Rick Rubin | The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding

Rick Rubin brings ancient wisdom to the modern age in The Way of Code, a meditation on the art and science of vibe coding. With Claude by Anthropic, the Grammy-award winning producer and author of The Creative Act turns philosophy into practice with artifacts that can be creatively modified with AI.

Rick Rubin | The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jeffrey Tao:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-25

A while ago I remember I came across a blog post or spreadsheet contrasting a large number of known non-textual programming languages. One attribute of each project was the modality: node-wire, scratch-like puzzle piece, etc. Does anyone know what I'm talking about or have a link? It is not The Whole Code Catalog or any of the linked surveys, nor is it the "Future of Coding or Programming: Project Comparison" spreadsheet.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Kartik Agaram: ๐Ÿ“„ Boxer: A Teacher's Experience [pdf]

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-27

Lovely and heartfelt.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ misha: Tacit Talk Episode 1: Uiua with Kai Schmidt

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-27

tacit (no local names), stack-oriented (forth), prefix-notated (lisp), APL https://www.uiua.org/
with a very good intro and "IDE" demo: Tacit Talk Episode 1: Uiua with Kai Schmidt

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Florian Schulz: ๐ŸŽ›๏ธ Frame of preference

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-27

Omg you can use all those old Mac OS versions here:
https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/

๐Ÿ“ Frame of preference

A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.

Frame of preference

AI

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jason Morris:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-23

That's an interesting way of framing AI usage. I'm not sure I like "authentic." I think there is a sort of expertise or craftsmanship or fluency that grows over time, but I don't know that it's ever inauthentic. I also think authenticity doesn't really explore whether you are upgrading existing systems, designing new systems for current tasks, or making new kinds of work possible. I think AI has unrecognized potential in that last category.

Present Company

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese: work on Automerge

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-23

Job posting โ€” Ink & Switch is looking for someone to work on Automerge. It's something like a TypeScript + DevRel role, so if that sounds like you and you want to come work with a small group of playful researchers & engineers (and me), we'd love to have you!


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/07 Week 3

2025-07-21 11:05

๐ŸŽฅ Casey Muratori โ€“ The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake ๐Ÿ“Composable higher-order reactors ๐Ÿ“ Introducing XMLUI

Two Minute Week

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jasmine Otto:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-17

Feeling excited to demo multiplayer Bitsy on Wednesday!

demo

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas: ๐Ÿ“ On Options For Programming

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-17

I've stated that CPUs don't implement "functions". In this article, I say this again, hopefully in a better way.

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas: ๐Ÿ“ Programming and Macros in 2025

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-16

Programming and Macros in 2025

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas: ๐ŸŽฅ Casey Muratori โ€“ The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake โ€“ BSC 2025

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-19

Watching this (again). I find myself wondering if this can be related to Morrison's FBP (flow based programming), especially his "conveyor belt" model. It, also, underlines my feeling that there should be a strong separation between the expression of programs in human-oriented terms, vs. some kind of automatic mapping from that human-readable domain to something production engineered to run on hardware CPUs. Currently, popular programming languages try to do both at once, usually leaning on humans to express code in ways that can be optimized for hardware (based on old-fashioned 1960s biases). I think that there should be two distinct languages and some automagic tooling that transforms from one to the other. A simple example is Prolog. Someone wrote a Prolog "engine" in machine code (or assembler, or an ancestor of assembler, like Lisp/Python/Haskell/C/etc). Prolog code allows humans to express "relational logic", then maps that logic onto operations for the engine (e.g. WAM).

Casey Muratori โ€“ The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake โ€“ BSC 2025

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Dave Bauer:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-20

I've been reflecting on this video and now I need to go learn about Flow Based Programming. I have been trying to imagine what changes could be made to some of the code I've developed if a model hierarchy was not the only possible solution.

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi: ๐Ÿ“Composable higher-order reactors as the basis for a live reactive programming environment

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-17

Came across this during my search for ideas on distributed reactivity:

Composable higher-order reactors as the basis for a live reactive programming environment

๐Ÿ“ [July 7th, 2025 11:00 PM] nilesh.tr: Folks, can you please point me to recent efforts in Distributed Reactive Programming?...

Folks, can you please point me to recent efforts in Distributed Reactive Programming? How can we build whole systems (spanning multiple simultaneous users as well as the database) in React/Vue/Svelte- like way, instead of just UI components? What are the typical challenges and the unsolved problems?

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ misha: ๐ŸŽฅ Casey Muratori โ€“ The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake โ€“ BSC 2025

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-17

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ misha: ๐ŸŽฅ Over the Shoulder 1 - Text Preprocessing in Forth

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-18

forth "repl"

Over the Shoulder 1 - Text Preprocessing in Forth

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Konrad Hinsen: ๐Ÿ“ Introducing XMLUI

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-19

Very mixed feelings about XMLUI . I like the motivation and the overall approach to an accessible glue language, but just about everything about the implementation feels wrong. XML syntax is perhaps the worst - does anyone really want to stare at that kind of code?

In the mid-1990s you could create useful software without being an ace coder. You had Visual Basic, you had a rich ecosystem of components, you could wire them together to create apps, standing on โ€ฆ

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Natalie Freed:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-19

Does anyone know where this quote comes from? "How is the abstraction, for understanding? Is it well designed to help you see what is happening underneath?" I was so certain it was from Learnable Programming or another Victor piece but I cannot for the life of me track it down. Maybe it's my paraphrase or misquote of someone and that's why I can't seem to Google it? Let me know if this rings a bell for anyone!

Present Company

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Maikel:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-14

Next week we have a FoC meetup planned (23th of july, see announcement in the message above)... but we're still looking for one person who wants to present / demo something about their FoC project.. if you have interest please let us know ๐Ÿ˜Š


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/07 Week 2

2025-07-14 10:36

๐Ÿ“ Unleashing the Power of End-User Programmable AI ๐ŸŽฅ Jonathan Blow - Jai Demo and Design Explanation ๐ŸŽฅ The future and promise of a post-AI world

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Dennis Hansen:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-08

Yo yoo! This is less technical but- thought it would be interesting to put LLM's into a generative 'outline' interface- I always loved workflowy, etc- maybe it sparks some ideas for y'all. Github - Play with it

๐ŸŽฅ branchy demo

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Karl Toby Rosenberg:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-10

Teaching computer science concepts (conditional branch handling and / or recursion) using Mondrian for inspiration?

๐ŸŽฅ solution video

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-08

Folks, can you please point me to recent efforts in Distributed Reactive Programming? How can we build whole systems (spanning multiple simultaneous users as well as the database) in React/Vue/Svelte- like way, instead of just UI components? What are the typical challenges and the unsolved problems?

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ curious_reader: ๐ŸŽฅ The InterBrain - How Collective DreamWeaving Can Heal the World

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-10

Hey Foc!
This piece got swamped, but I do think it is worth while.
๐ŸŽฅ The InterBrain - How Collective DreamWeaving Can Heal the World
In the Video the Author proposes a tool to enable new communication patterns. He asks for fundraising: ๐Ÿ“ ProjectLiminality - Open Collective

And apparently he got funded.

He got like 160 issues yesterday , now its some epics.
https://github.com/ProjectLiminality/InterBrainMVP/issues

Why is it interesting? If you spend some time going through the README.md you can see that some aspects of it cover things like transclusion or spatial design. I can not help but it reminds me a lot of xanadu. Pretty interesting I will follow up.

The InterBrain - How Collective DreamWeaving Can Heal the World

An open source communication and co-creation layer bridging ancient wisdom & modern systems to reshape how we collectively share and organise around ideas

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi: ๐Ÿ“ Unleashing the Power of End-User Programmable AI

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-08

Erik Meijer on end-user programmable AI : ๐Ÿ“ Unleashing the Power of End-User Programmable AI

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-08

Chad Fowler lamenting the loss of programming as a craft people cared about:

๐Ÿ“ท image.png

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Mihai: ๐ŸŽฅ Jonathan Blow - Jai Demo and Design Explanation

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-09

New Jonathan Blow talk at LambdaConf about Jai

Jonathan Blow - Jai Demo and Design Explanation (KEYNOTE) - Updated

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-10

Algebraic Replicated Data Types (ARDT): Programming Secure Local-First Software - by Rescala Lang folks
Found this as I am reading and learning about distributed reactive systems, specifically around web applications, where the same reactive DAG could manage state across clients, backends and databases.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ KP Kaiser:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-10

anyone interested in collaborating on a project for multiplayer LLMs and the future of social media?

think people working together to make a social media feed, a bit like twitch plays pokemon.

I'm looking for a frontend dev to partner with on a prototype project, making some chat UI components and some multiplayer chat to video. I've got a decent budget for infrastructure and have built a whole api that already exists and could work with this. it would just be a thing we build and release, with a couple thousand bucks worth of infrastructure credits I can throw at it.

feel free to shoot me a dm if you're interested in chatting!

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ misha:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-13

https://bettersoftwareconference.com/ is happening now (online)

AI

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas: ๐ŸŽฅ The future and promise of a post-AI world

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-07

This keynote about the future of AI is from a non-programmer perspective. I found the discussion of "authentic AI" to be interesting. (meta: a trick that I have begun using is to watch a video, then, if I want to refer to a certain point without re-watching, grab the transcript and ask an LLM to summarize it)

๐ŸŽฅ The future and promise of a post-AI world

The future and promise of a post-AI world


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/07 Week 1

2025-07-07 17:11

๐ŸŽจ Paint: a timeline โ†”๏ธ Codeโ‡„GUI bidirectional editing via LSP ๐Ÿงซ Live, navigable & interactive visualization of the Observable runtime graph

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Tom Larkworthy: ๐Ÿงซ cellMap

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-06

Finished my live, navigable and interactive visualization of the Observable runtime graph. Works on both Observable and Lopecode.

  • live: if you add/remove a cell the visualisation update.
  • navigable: if you click a cell you are taken to the cell source (on observable this opens a new tab and scrolls to the cell)
  • interactive: as you scroll though birds eye view the detailed visualization expands the dependancies of the focused cell. You can click to pin the current cell.

The overall point of this notebook is to provoke the reader into understanding the programming model and ask questions like "what is a viewof" when they try to understand the dependancy graph. Its also useful for authors to find stray dependancies and plan refactors on complex notebook networks.

cellMap

computes the mapping of reactive variables to higher level notebook cells, grouped by module cellMap cellMap function You can call it with zero args to default to the current runtime, or pass in a subset of variables to extract the cell structure from just those. Visualizations visualize the cell ordering testing low-level variables in this module Utilities

cellMap

DevLog Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Tom Larkworthy: ๐ŸŽฅ edit menu

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-30

Been working on trying to help the reader understand the computational graph a bit more. Also trying to improve the UX a bit. Now the dependancies are show under each cell, but the edit menu has to be enabled first so its less annoying if you are jsut reading. Clicking the links take you to the cell. Thanks Konrad Hinsen for the push ๐Ÿ™‚ . WIP coz it does not link across module imports yet, or built in functions.

๐ŸŽฅ edit menu

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Tom Larkworthy:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-02

Trying to help map the cell structure of a reactive runtime. WIP this is overwhelming but it looks pretty. The clumps are modules. The concentrated rainbow arc is pointing at the stdlib. It does communicate the intense collaberation inside a module and the sparse connections between modules though.

๐Ÿ“ท image.png

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Oleksandr Kryvonos: https://natto.dev/

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-02

can someone remind me there is a project that was shared here, a canvas for JS workflows... ? found it - https://natto.dev/

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ When Leggett:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-02

So obviously ignore this discussion prompt if it seems dumb or out of scope. Its maybe not as "direct" a connection to the future of coding.

Lately I've been finding myself wondering more and more often what kinds of agents might be sneaking into different spaces and for what different purposes. On places like reddit, instagram, or bluesky, we know that there are plenty of bots engagement farming or pushing misinformation or advertising or simply acting as fake followers to boost accounts. However, we know that bots/fake accounts are also a common vector for scraping, as it can bypass rate limiting or private areas like this slack.

In the last several years, as social media platforms have become enshittified, and the average user has felt less inclined to post, and started spending more time in messaging and group chat spaces like whatsapp, discord, signal, slack etc. In small group spaces, like a personal friend group, you obviously wouldn't have a bot sneak in, but a group chat like this one has thousands of members and it likely would be easy for a bot to get in. Who knows, there may be one or more here now.

So here are my questions: - do you think there are bots here? - If so, does it bother you? Do you feel like you want to preserve human discussion spaces from spying, interference, scraping, or being trained on? - Do we need to consider more deeply how the future of computing will be affected by so many non-human users including many malicious actors? - Do we need an improvement at the infrastructure/ecosystem level to securely/practically enable the kind of end-user programming that is commonly discussed here? To own your connections/contacts/community. To have better protocols/standards/etc for communication. Are we really stuck on email as the only really open mainstream communication standard?

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese: ๐ŸŽจ Paint: a timeline

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-01

A beautiful virtual museum of digital painting programs throughout the history of computing, from the 60s through the 90s (via Patrick Dubroy) โ€” Paint: a timeline

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jasmine Otto:

๐Ÿ“ Codeโ‡„GUI bidirectional editing via LSP

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-07-02

x-posting James Vaughan (via redblobgames):

Intriguing: live editing usually lets you edit some value in the browser or running app, but with an "LSP server" you can have it work with your existing text editor to edit in the original environment

๐Ÿ“ Codeโ‡„GUI bidirectional editing via LSP

I built a small proof-of-concept for a system that enables real-time bidirectional editing between any modern code editor and a GUI, enabled by an LSP1 server. Code-based CAD I like working on small projects at home that benefit from CAD. Iโ€™m also a programmer with a personal development environment that Iโ€™ve spent years making as cozy as possible. Naturally Iโ€™ve been interested in finding code-based CAD system to use for my projects that allows me to use that cozy development environment.

Present Company

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Andrew F:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-30

Does anyone know of a nice accessible survey of the state of reactive programming today, ideally with a focus on the different flavors/features and what kind of patterns they enable?


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/06 Week 5

2025-06-30 09:02

๐ŸŽฅ Virtual Meetup 12 โ€ข June 2025 ๐Ÿ—“๏ธ Next FoC Meetup ๐Ÿ”Œ MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Konrad Hinsen: ๐Ÿ“ Explaining software and computational methods

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-26

A blog post about my recent work, which is what I demoed a while ago in an online meetup: Explaining software and computational methods

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Guyren Howe: ๐Ÿ“ First-Class Models: The Missing Productivity Revolution

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-26

This will likely interest the folks here:

๐Ÿ“ 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.

First-Class Models: The Missing Productivity Revolution

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Scott: ๐Ÿ”Œ MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-28

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

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-29

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

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Kartik Agaram: ๐ŸŽฅ James Boyd White, "Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law" : Kartik Agaram - Internet Archive

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-27

It seemed worth doing: I just recorded a video reading out every word of the 1985 paper "Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law".

(previously)

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...

James Boyd White, "Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law" : Kartik Agaram : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ wtaysom:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-28

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 โ€œLogo Turtleโ€ billed as a โ€œcybernetic toyโ€ that you programmed in โ€œa language for poets, scientists and philosophers.โ€ 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

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ hvrosen: Teen Hacker Fined After Making Local Traffic Lights Sync Properly

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-27

End-user programming in-the-wild ;-)

Teen Hacker Fined After Making Local Traffic Lights Sync Properly

Present Company

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese: ๐ŸŽฅ Virtual Meetup 12 โ€ข June 2025

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-26

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.

Virtual Meetup 12 โ€ข June 2025

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Tom Larkworthy: ๐Ÿฆ‹ interjectedfuture.com

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-27

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.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Maikel: ๐Ÿ—“๏ธ FoC Meetup ยท Luma

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-29

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

FoC Meetup ยท Luma


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/06 Week 4

2025-06-23 11:22

๐Ÿฆ… Eagle Mode ๐ŸŽฅ This is not a Clojure talk ๐Ÿ’พ Ultorg 2.0 Released

Two Minute Week

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jasmine Otto:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-22

Dusting off my Bitsy fork with simultaneous editing across clients. Right now I have Automerge imported and working. Except - while Bitsy is a tiny game engine, it's a massive project to refactor into ES6 modules, due to that Automerge dependency.

This week I got Bitsy's built-in icons working, and I've yanked all of the onclick bindings from inline HTML into a shim module. As I refactor out all of the global state leaks, I have discovered one actual cyclic dependency between modules. I bet I can fix this with an existing instance object.

Share Your Work

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-16

I've been exploring combining Reactive UI components (those that separate the state, the methods to update the state, and computed values such as the UI), with the same methods given as tools to LLM-powered agent. The user can then either use the UI as normal or ask the AI to act on the state: with perfect fidelity between the two.

I want to see if there is an abstraction concise enough for such components to live on the server instead of the client to enable multiplayer realtime collaboration across many humans and agents. It ought to be possible to accomplish this with much less plumbing.

๐Ÿ“ท image.png

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-16

FYI... Prolog Related References

Beginnings of Scheme (prolog-6.scm) to Javascript tranpsiler using t2t and PBP and Ohm-editor, debug session recording

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ guitarvydas: ๐Ÿฆ… Eagle Mode

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-18

brainstorming:

  • A friend was fooling with a midi/mixer control surface as a layered interface to a bank of apps/subdirectories. A grid of buttons, push into one then get a sub-grid of buttons within it, or, open the app.
  • IMO, software is just soft hardware. What ideas come to mind for simulating a Z controller before committing to hardware? It seems that an obvious choice might be to put a 2nd scroll bar next to the Y scroll bar. The 2nd scroll bar might be "Z"oom in/out and it might be shaped in a more triangular manner than just a rectangular movable thumb on a rectangular bar. In an orthogonal vein: Ivan Reese posted some interesting looking circular knob ideas.
  • 2 sliders, one to control scrollable thing, one to control resolution of 1st slider.
  • veering even further away from the original thread, there are ZUIs like EagleMode.

Homepage of Eagle Mode (eaglemode) - a zoomable user interface (ZUI) with file manager, file viewers, audio/video player, games, fractals, and C++ toolkit API.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Jack Rusher: ๐ŸŽฅ This is not a Clojure talk - Jack Rusher | Craft 2025

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-20

My latest talk, given at Craft Conf in Budapest. There were some technical difficulties, but it should hopefully serve as a reasonable introduction to the virtues of interactive development in Clojure.

This is not a Clojure talk - Jack Rusher | Craft 2025

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Karl Toby Rosenberg:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-21

TahDah: https://github.com/KTRosenberg/DrawTalking

A prototype user experience concept for building interactive worlds and telling stories at the same time by sketching and speaking

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Scott: ๐Ÿ“ The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-22

I wrote a fun little post about something I've been playing around with with LLMs, how might programming change when LLMs can get what you mean without you getting it exactly right:

๐Ÿ“ The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles

or how I learned to stop worrying and love fuzzy vegetables

The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles

DevLog Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-19

I'm still thinking a lot about what a "point literal" or a "vec literal" means in the context of visual programming.

In text we have "string literal", it has a bunch of affordances. In visual/spatial/tangible/etc programming, we'd probably want other primitive types with their own set of affordances. So point and vec, obviously. I wonder what else we'd want, and how it would look and act.

Linking Together

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Ivan Reese:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-16

News: Dark has run out of money and is going employee-owned, I guess? And they're going open source. Seems like making the very best of a bad situation. Kudos to them.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Kartik Agaram:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-17

I'm going to forever take the FoC podcast episode on Rules of Code as license to consider the law and philosophy in scope here. Here's a fantastic bit of writing, just in holding my debased attention span 40 years later: James Boyd White, "Law as rhetoric, rhetoric as law: The arts of cultural and communal life"

(A hack for sticking with it.)

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-18

Dyad is a declarative physical modeling language that has a one-to-one mapping with GUI views. This gives a textual representation that is amenable to analysis and generation by generative AI and devops pipelines, while allowing the same artifact to be used in the graphical environment.

https://help.juliahub.com/dyad/dev/

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Mariano Guerra:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-18

Ultorg 2.0 Released!

Ultorg is an efficient, spreadsheet-like UI for complex business data. Query and edit data across tables and relationships, without SQL or custom CRUD apps.

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Kartik Agaram:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-19

A different take on s-expressions making them more.. visual?

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ David Alan Hjelle: ๐ŸŽฅ Episode 158 - INTERCAL RIDES AGAIN - Restoring a Lost Compiler

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-19

The Advent of Computing podcast has an episode on Intercal โ€” and apparently also resurrected (at some level) the original compiler (to run on x86).

Episode 158 - INTERCAL RIDES AGAIN - Restoring a Lost Compiler

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Konrad Hinsen: ๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Samuel Arbesman on The Magic of Code - The Jim Rutt Show

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-21

A nice podcast episode with Jim Rutt inverviewing Sam Arbesman on his new book "The Magic of Code" (which is now on my reading list). A good reminder (for those who need it, perhaps not so much people here) that computing is not just utilitarian.

Since Sam is around here, some short feedback:

  1. It's weird to hear both of you dismissing APL as a mess not even worth learning, and then discussing computing as a tool for thought a few minutes later. The link between the topic should be obvious from just the title of Ken Iverson's Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a tool of thought:null:", which I definitely recommend everybody to read. APL was designed as a mathematical notation for algorithmic problems, and only later turned into an executable notation at IBM. It is certainly not, and was never meant to be, a language for writing large software systems. But for its intended problem domain, it still is a good choice.
  2. Programming languages not based on English are indeed rare, but there are a few interesting examples beyond just translating keywords. ๆ–‡่จ€ (wenyan) is based on classical Chinese that tries to incorporate even its grammar. Perligata similarly takes inspiration from Latin grammar to build a Perl-like language on something pretty close to Latin (though not being "good" Latin, neither in vocabulary nor grammar). For those who read French, the slides of a presentation by Baptiste Mรฉlรจs say something about both these projects (I think the presentation was recorded, but I can't find it anywhere). Hedy by Felienne and coworkers is a very different take on this topic: a language meant to make programming accessible to people from various cultural backgrounds.

Jim talks with Samuel Arbesman about his book The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our Worldโ€”and Shapes Our Future.

EP 304 Samuel Arbesman on The Magic of Code - The Jim Rutt Show

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ brett g porter:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-21

Programming languages not based on English are indeed rare, but there are a few interesting examples beyond just translating keywords

Also Ramsey Nasser's Qalb

AI

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-16

AI is a new kind of computer.

  • A traditional computer processes structured data with deterministic instructions.
  • AI processes unstructured data with natural-language nondeterministic instructions.

I like the simplicity of this framing.

But personally, I am more interested in unifying both these kind of computational work: Mathematical (precise & deterministic data structures and instructions) and human-media centric (language, image/audio/video etc) which approximate/ambiguous.

https://jeffhuber.substack.com/p/ai-is-a-new-computer

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Nilesh Trivedi:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-18

Gemini Flash Lite generating UI on-the-fly:

๐Ÿฆ Oriol Vinyals (@OriolVinyalsML) on X

Hello Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite! So fast, it codes *each screen* on the fly (Neural OS concept :point_down:).

The frontier isn't always about large models and beating benchmarks. In this case, a super fast & good model can unlock drastic use cases.

Read more: https://t.co/kbkC8CtVYb

Oriol Vinyals (@OriolVinyalsML) on X

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Scott:

๐Ÿงต conversation @ 2025-06-18

Have any of you here spent any time with MCPs at all?

I've just started building an MCP client into this app i'm working on, and it hit me that this could be what enables a lot more of end user modification of programs and a version of Malleable software...though not completely malleable. You don't have to interact with them through a conversational or agentic interface, you can just treat them like RPCs, and if you set up standardized integration points into your application, users can build all types of customizations for at the very least the objects or metaphors within your system


๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป By ๐Ÿ˜ @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io ๐Ÿฆ @warianoguerra

๐Ÿ’ฌ Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

โœ‰๏ธ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Contents ยฉ 2025 Mariano Guerra - Powered by Nikola