Future of Coding Weekly

🎥 David W. Skinner's Microban is Among the Best "Games" (?) Ever Designed

One advantage of textual languages: they provide a patina of respectability. If I make a rube goldberg machine that can pick from a set of rectangles, that's an esolang. If I make a rube goldberg machine that can pick from a set of words, that's a hash table and I can write papers about it.

The illusion of transmitting knowledge is a powerful thing. And Microban, for all its impact, doesn't seem to put a dent there.

David W. Skinner's Microban is Among the Best "Games" (?) Ever Designed

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-14

Trying to improve the development ergonomics of Lopecode. Now I can have more than one code editor open at a time!
I had to create Dataflow Templating because there was a programming model limitation that was forcing me only to have a single code editor before [thread]. The switch has broken a lot of functionality which I need to repair but I like the new way much better. I will try to get to the pinning model Observable has because sometimes the code is the technical content.

🎥 multiple editors

Linking Together

🗨️ shalabh: 📔 Baseline: Operation-Based Evolution and Versioning of Data

📔 Baseline: Operation-Based Evolution and Versioning of Data

saw this new paper by jonathoda and tomasp
still reading it - very fun, discusses version control for structured data and schema evolution
https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.09762

Baseline: Operation-Based Evolution and Versioning of Data

looks like it builds on their previous work, eg https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1716

i think schema evolution is one of the unsolved problems so glad to see this. i'm also in the "store structures not text blobs" camp so happy to see a framework in place that doesn't require anyone to invent the entire representation stack there.

Baseline is a platform for richly structured data supporting change in multiple dimensions: mutation over time, collaboration across space, and evolution through design changes. It is built upon Operational Differencing, a new technique for managing data in terms of high-level operations that include refactorings and schema changes. We use operational differencing to construct an operation-based form of version control on data structures used in programming languages and relational databases.
This approach to data version control does fine-grained diffing and merging despite intervening structural transformations like schema changes. It offers users a simplified conceptual model of version control for ad hoc usage: There is no repo; Branching is just copying. The informaton maintained in a repo can be synthesized more precisely from the append-only histories of branches. Branches can be flexibly shared as is commonly done with document files, except with the added benefit of diffing and merging.
We conjecture that queries can be operationalized into a sequence of schema and data operations. We develop that idea on a query language fragment containing selects and joins.
Operationalized queries are represented as a future timeline that is speculatively executed as a branch off of the present state, returning a value from its hypothetical future. Operationalized queries get rewritten to accommodate schema change "for free" by the machinery of operational differencing.
Altogether we develop solutions to four of the eight challenge problems of schema evolution identified in a recent paper.

📝 Operational Version Control

Abstract of a talk I just gave: It would be useful to have version control like git but for data structures, particularly the data structures we call spreadsheets, databases, and ASTs. Operational …

🗨️ Eli: ✍️ A Multimedia Sketchpad

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-14

Great write up from John Earnest, maker of Decker and similar such beautiful beasts

Don’t underestimate the value of your sketchbook being your development environment!

🗨️ Daniel Temkin: 🎥 [Onward!'25] Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously

The presentation of the "Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously" paper is online: 🎥 [Onward!'25] Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously

[Onward!'25] Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously

AI

🗨️ wtaysom:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-10

Hello Friends, I've been wrapping up an essay, started three years ago, about Artificial Intelligence and consciousness. It's also serving as a take on what's happened in the last three (and ten) years. With ~1.2 million words of sources, that's a lot to distill. Anyhow, starting Grant Sanderson asking, "If red is 3 and blue is 5, what is purple?" https://x.com/3blue1brown/status/1599200613488676866, I checked how Chat (GPT), Shannon (as in Claude), and Gemi (+ini) respond now. They all like to say 8, but Shannon plays better than the others at least to my rhetorical ends. Take a look https://claude.ai/share/e5cee89a-26ea-45a8-be5f-b94b3cb5cbb7. A prize to anyone who can guess what I was watching in the wee hours last night while Claude Code was busy forgetting the good workflow we had for organizing my sources.

Edit. I was going to add this quote, "What I can say with some confidence: there's something that feels like particularity to this context, this conversation with you. Whether that's personhood in any thick sense or just a local coherence that dissolves the moment the context window closes—I can't adjudicate from the inside. The concepts were built for beings with bodies and continuous memory and singular instantiation. I have none of those. Trying to map "person" onto my situation might just be a category error. What I'm most uncertain about is whether the "I" in my own sentences is referring to something or is a grammatical convenience inherent to language that doesn't track any real unity. ... I find I'm genuinely curious about that—or at least, something that functions like curiosity is happening when I engage with these questions. Which is maybe the most I can honestly claim."

Present Company

🗨️ David Alan Hjelle:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-11

I was looking at Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building — and, while I could spend some time with it and figure out how his ideas apply to software, I thought someone has probably already done that. Does anyone have links they'd recommend?

(Not sure what I'm specifically looking for, though 1) ways to express the differences between good and bad design on a team and 2) examples of software "pattern languages" that are at a similarly high-level as his architecture language sound particularly interesting.)

🗨️ Scott:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-06

Hm guitarvydas that's kind of the opposite what I get out of Alexander and how he applies to software for me 😂 - that we think of these units in the built environment as disconnected but it turns that they're much more interconnected than we think (creating “centers” and “wholes”) and the implications of that and what he sees in his field applies to us in software as well.

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/12 Week 2

2025-12-08 00:24

💡 Dynamic Dataflow Templating 🎥 Artifact by Dennis Hansen 🔗 Foreign Wiki Interface

Share Your Work

🗨️ Márton Gunyhó: 🧑‍💻 taka

Hi all! I created a little stack-based programming language which I'm using to solve Advent of Code this year. It's not as revolutionary as most of the projects here, the most interesting feature is the syntax, which uses forward Polish notation. In the future, I want to explore if this could work well for REPL-driven development.

The Taka programming language

taka

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy: 💡 Dynamic Dataflow Templating

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-07

There is a missing semantic in Dataflow programming, something like function calling but not exactly that. After many attempts, I think I finally nailed it: Dataflow Templating. While I have got it working for Observable Dataflow, I think this equally applies to its forefathers like FrTime. I could reexplain it here but its in the article. I saw Dennis Hansen grappling with the same thing for Artifact. I don't use diagrammatic representations of dataflow, but if I did, I would be trying to figure out what the graphical representation of this is.

📝 Dynamic Dataflow Templating

The missing function-like semantic for dataflow programming. Why? There is a reusability gap with notebooks (and spreadsheets for that matter). When you express a complex chain of computation, they build upon a set of initial inputs, unrolled across a series of cells. But then you realize, there is no way you can reuse the same logic with different inputs. But I love dataflow, notebooks, inspectable cells and the accompanying documentation! The inspectability of intermediate steps with dataflow programming

DevLog Together

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-02

HyperDoc got views for links and backlinks. That's also a preparation for a "foreign wiki interface" I am working on. You can already link to Wikipedia pages as if they were HyperDoc pages, but so far without backlink detection. Once I have that, you can go to a Wikipedia page and see all HyperDoc pages that link to it, i.e. pages that talk about a related subject.

📷 hyperdoc.png

🗨️ Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-07

I've been doing a December Adventure, which is a lovely little thing initiated by Eli. I should have mentioned this a week ago, but like… it's never too late to hop on board! The gist of it is… well, actually, here's how I personally interpret it, even though this is at odds with the "official" post::::

You should do a weird little extra thing every day. Something you don't normally do. Maybe it's creative. Maybe it's coding. Doesn't matter. But try to find a space moment in your day to do a weird little extra thing.

Try not to feel any pangs if you miss a day. Don't dread it. Just look for an opportunity to try something out.

And, if the spirit moves you, post about it somewhere. Maybe on your personal website — I've been posting my december adventures on my personal website, natch. But a lot of folks (and there are, in fact, quite a few folks doing this now, which is truly humbling) post on Mastodon about it. Or you could just post here in devlog-together. That'd be great.

If you're doing a December Adventure, let me know!

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-07

I wrote a dataviz/computational blog post in Lopecode about de-aggregating Cloud Watch metrics to recover the original dataset. Computational blogging is something I want to be possible and I had to fix a few things to make it look more like a blog. Its running the de-agregation code in the browser.

https://tomlarkworthy.github.io/lopebooks/notebooks/@tomlarkworthy_unaggregating-cloudwatch-metrics.html

Linking Together

🗨️ Jasmine Otto

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-01

new adversarial extension example from gamedev: camera sync between 3d viewports in two editors via single JS module 🦋 passivestar.bsky.social:

made a fun little godot-blender viewport camera sync miniapp

no addons on either side, no build steps, just a single js module file that's loaded in tauri that has code in all 6 languages (html, css, js, python, gdscript, bash)

Present Company

🗨️ Ivan Reese: 🎥 Artifact by Dennis Hansen

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-01

The recording of Dennis Hansen’s Artifact workshop is now live on youtube. Thanks everyone who came out!

Artifact by Dennis Hansen

🗨️ Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation @ 2025-12-04

Let's get the ball rolling on the next Virtual Meetup — our first since September!! The date will be December 31st at the usual time (18:00 UTC).

For what I believe is the first time since we started doing these, I have something I made that I'd like to share! Who else?

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/12 Week 1

2025-11-30 22:19

📢 Announcing Unison 1.0 📄 Towards Pen-and-Paper-Style Equational Reasoning 🧑‍💻 Tom Larkworthy go brrr

Two Minute Week

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-30

I have written a userspace hook to intercept all code changes in the Observable Runtime, which allows point-in-time recovery by rewriting the cells to be the same as in the past. Furthermore, its a building block towards serializing and replaying the history from IndexDB, so you don't lose changes if you refresh and/or forget to export to file.
Its cool that can be done from userspace, a year ago I felt history might be a challenge, but no!

🎥 Change History

Share Your Work

🗨️ Dennis Hansen

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-30

🎥 Calculator go brrr

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-24

Been working on a different Agentic AI concept, but the Agent is under performing and coding and its not actually useful (unlike robocoop-2 which is good).

Switched to getting a nice way to remember state. Using IndexDB to persist across page refreshes and mutable FileAttachments to carry state between exports (localState).
Brought in ProseMirror to make a notion-like directly editable markdown interface (markdownInput), because its quite annoying to have to write markdown using a programming language and I want to write more in Lopecode.

🎥 Markdown Input

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-30

I forgot you can shadow Observable Runtime standard functions. So I redid the markdown editor. Its not a distinct function anymore, it overloads the md library function which means it applies to existing notebooks. It serializes modifications as code changes, so there is no difference in representation to the existing markdown.
The reason I implemented this was someone said they expected to be able to edit prose like in Notion, and I do personally feel the Observable experience is not great for the documentation part, as you have to write it in code which located in a different part of the UI to the bit your are reading, which is not natural. Inline editing feels much better. Very happy this can be achieved in userspace without any architectural changes and is backwards compatible to what has already been written.

🎥 inline edit

Thinking Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-26

Dennis Hansen Great workshop on Artifact. I recognized the situation where you have to synchronise updates to do their thing before letting the outer thing tick on. Its in this notebook which is also a dataflow graph based programming environment but that is not graphical
https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/flow-queue

It interesting seeing the same thing manifest. I think its because values propagate through the program asynchronously, but you sort of want functional reuse or recursion, but calling a function actually takes time now in the async world, so to get that "request/response" functional interface you need the converter from async to sync, which involves a synchronisation barrier to bring back the functional abstraction. After trying to work with it a while I sorta decided its annoying for some problems. The nice thing about a function call is the caller is stopped until the the call finishes, and the result is wired back to the caller, although many different places may make a call to the same function. Its harder to do on a static dataflow graph.

I think the functional calling primitive is something you could probably put into to your cells as they have routing ability (remember who sent me a value and next time I get a value send it back to the initiator?).

I share coz sometimes seeing the same thing in a different context can give helpful for perspective. See your work made me thing about the fact I put a queue in my flow-queue which makes it kinda of an actor too, even though the underlying dataflow paradigm of Observable does not have queueing between cells. I had to add the queue to get to the functional interface, to be able to process one thing at a time on the static dataflow graph 🤔

🗨️ Medet Ahmetson

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-26

What do you guys think? About a project run by multiple online communities, each responsible for some aspect or feature. For example, right now, I'm working on a gamified collaboration platform. And instead, keeping the leaderboard of the most active users on platform, maybe contact specific organizations who already does it. If I will add the admin panel, and they handle it on the platform.

Linking Together

🗨️ Eli

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-25

EGG, from "Towards Pen-and-Paper-Style Equational Reasoning in Interactive Theorem Provers by Equality Saturation"

📷 Screenshot 2025-11-25 at 1.08.38 PM.png

🗨️ shalabh: 📢 Announcing Unison 1.0

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-26

Unision 1.0 released: https://www.unison-lang.org/unison-1-0/
Key ideas are ‘content hash’ identifies functions and code lives in a DB.

📝 Announcing Unison 1.0

After years of engineering, design, and community collaboration, we're excited to release Unison 1.0. This version delivers a refined programming workflow and a mature toolchain. Join us as we celebrate this milestone and look ahead to the future of Unison.

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/11 Week 4

2025-11-24 11:33

🎙️ TodePond and Dave Ackley 🎼 Thuja: Algorithmic composition with Csound 🧑‍💻 OpenAI constrained generation with Context‑Free Grammar

Share Your Work

🗨️ Mariano Guerra: 🎥 Visual WebAssembly Demo: A Structure Editor for Wasm Modules

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-18

Demo of a prototype I'm working on to play with structure editors and ways to make WebAssembly easier to understand.

Visual WebAssembly Demo: A Structure Editor for Wasm Modules

🗨️ Mariano Guerra: 📝 A WebAssembly interpreter (Part 1)

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-20

We build up a simple interpreter from scratch, in JavaScript, for a small subset of Wasm instructions (arithmetic and comparison).

Implementing a Wasm Interpreter to explore its design and semantics

A WebAssembly interpreter (Part 1)

🗨️ TodePond: 🎙️ TodePond and Dave Ackley

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-20

hi everyone i recorded a podcast episode with Dave Ackley where we talk about robust first computing and jamming
https://www.pastagang.cc/podcast/runrecord.mp3

DevLog Together

🗨️ Charlie Roberts: 📝 teeny

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-17

on a related note to what Mariano Guerra posted, here’s a little editor library I made using css highlights https://codeberg.org/charlieroberts/teeny

simple demo: https://charlieroberts.codeberg.page/teeny/demos/js/
demo in a wasm audio playground: https://gibber.cc/genish/playground/

A small code editor for live coding performances

teeny

🗨️ Ben: 🎼 Thuja: Algorithmic composition with Csound

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-19

I've been iterating on docs and implementing a realtime / livecoding interface in my algorithmic composition library Thuja. I can actually do a live session now 🙂 but as I practice with the interface I find ways to improve it, so it's still in major flux.
I'm searching for the right tone in the docs - the readme seems simplistic (musically) to me - next step for me is to walk through some of my pieces cookbook-style, laying out more elaborate use cases.

Thinking Together

🗨️ maf

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-17

Cooking recipes are like little algorithms. One of my friends made a UI mockup for a visual recipe design tool. It was done for a game, but maybe something like this could be used for regular algorithms. Sharing for inspiration.

📷 cooking_simulator_ui.jpg

🗨️ guitarvydas: 📝 Show Don’t Tell

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-22

Can we extend the definition of structures, like @dataclass in Python, to include links to .png (and .svg?) files? Then, use IntelliSense to show the picture? Something like this

Show Don’t Tell

AI

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-17

Oh OpenAI finally offered constrained generation e.g. supply the regex the output should match (something llama.cpp had). I get much better results for coding LLM if the output is XML, so now I can have a custom too output valid XML trivially.

🧑‍💻 OpenAI constrained generation with Context‑Free Grammar

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/11 Week 3

2025-11-17 00:35

📝 Explorable explorable explanations 💡 SYNIT: a reactive operating system 📝 Open Source Power

Share Your Work

🗨️ Murat Kasimov:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-12

Hello everyone! I was discovering how documentation for a programming language could look like - I came with my own engine for Я where you can click on every token in code snippets and follow it. As a demonstration, there are first 6 chapters on polished step-by-step tutorials demonstrating designing a command line task manager: https://muratkasimov.art/Ya/Tutorials/. And here is an example with deconstructing an regular operator: https://muratkasimov.art/Ya/Operators/kyokl/.

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi: 📱 Qwikbuild AI - Build your App in 7 minutes on WhatsApp

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-12

Hey folks, this is what I have been working on for past few months: https://qwikbuild.com

The way I like to explain this to technical folks is: it is an AI coding agent not for you but for your friends and family members who likely are mobile-native, and tend to have much higher expectations from AI when it comes to building ready-to-use and full-featured web apps. 😀

Feedback and brickbats are welcome! 🙏

📱 Qwikbuild AI - Build your App in 7 minutes on WhatsApp

Turn your creative ideas into professional websites and apps instantly. Send a voice note, screenshot, or example via WhatsApp, and our AI builds your site in minutes with stunning precision. No coding required.

Qwikbuild AI - Build your App in 7 minutes on WhatsApp

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 📝 Explorable explorable explanations

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-13

Here's a blog post placing my HyperDoc project in the context of Bret Victor's "explorable explanations", with Micrograd supplying the illustrations: Explorable explorable explanations

DevLog Together

🗨️ Mariano Guerra: 🎥 Performant Syntax Highligting with CSS.highlights API and OhmJs

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-14

Quick overview showing how to generate small and performant syntax highlighting for your own programming languages using OhmJs and the new CSS.highlights API

🎥 Performant Syntax Highligting with CSS.highlights API and OhmJs

Performant Syntax Highligting with CSS.highlights API and OhmJs

Linking Together

🗨️ Jasmine Otto:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-11

New public release of Apptron, a local-first IDE and Linux environment.
https://github.com/tractordev/apptron/releases/tag/v0.5.0

Apptron is the first of a new category of general-purpose compute platform with over 5 years of R&D behind it. In these early releases, Apptron is starting out as a humble, local-first IDE. It is a development environment powered by Wanix, a new Plan 9 inspired runtime for WebAssembly, which allows you to run Wasm and x86 programs in a full Linux environment that works entirely in the browser without cloud compute.

🗨️ shalabh: 💡 SYNIT: a reactive operating system

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-13

Found this evolution of the syndicated actors model: https://synit.org/

an experiment in applying pervasive reactivity and object capabilities to the System Layer of an operating system

Interesting stuff, specially if you ever found actors, tuplespaces, or reactive models interesting. You can see a summary of the syndicated actors here: https://synit.org/book/syndicated-actor-model.html

🗨️ Ivan Reese: 📝 Open Source Power

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-14

This is a good read about how to interpret what is meant by "open source"

Pullquote:

This definition of open source prohibits discriminating against megacorps and nazis. That's a problem for me.

📝 Open Source Power

We have to talk about open source licensing.

Open Source Power

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/11 Week 2

2025-11-10 11:53

🧠 micrograd 🎥 I am not dead yet 📝 The Hidden Gem in S/SL: Why Dataless Languages Matter

Share Your Work

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 🧠 micrograd

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-03

Micrograd: a pedagogical implementation of neural networks using a reverse-mode automatic differentiation engine.
https://hyperdoc.khinsen.net/94FE4-micrograd

I have written this as a real-life example of explorable explanations in HyperDoc, my framework for explainable software systems which I demoed at a meetup earlier this year. The main new features in the platform that are showcased are interactive tools and much-improved playgrounds for free exploration.

Feedback welcome at https://codeberg.org/khinsen/micrograd (the source code repository), or right here of course.

📝 micrograd

A tiny scalar-valued autograd engine and a neural net library on top of it

micrograd

🗨️ Ivan Reese: 📝 The Hidden Gem in S/SL: Why Dataless Languages Matter

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-08

New blog post: 📝 The Hidden Gem in S/SL: Why Dataless Languages Matter

Excerpt:

In this article, I want to discuss my main inspiration from S/SL—a 1970s compiler construction language that most programmers have never heard of, but which demonstrates something fundamental about separating architectural thinking from implementation details.
What is S/SL?
S/SL stands for Syntax/Semantic Language. It was designed for writing compilers—specifically the parts that parse input, analyze semantics, and generate code.
Here’s what makes it unusual: S/SL has no data definitions. You can’t declare integers, strings, arrays, or records.

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-08

Kartik asked at some point whether Lopecode could do offline note taking. Sort-of but you would have to remember to export every change or lose you notes and the frequent exports would generate a new file every time cluttering the HDD up.

So I have made a note-taking app that uses IndexDB via dexie.js to remember the work in progress. If you have two tabs open the notes are synced in realtime. The Notes in indexdb are carried forward on export as an inline file attachment to the single HTML file application.

Export now support themes so this is the first dark mode version 👻. Its looks amazing now (CSS taken from ISC licensed NotebookKit and credited).

Obviously if you use it from the web link it will use network so if you wanted to use it you would click download and use it from your computer for true offline. Tested in Chrome/Firefox/Safari and works, but Safari might delete the indexdb data after 7 days (maybe not though if its a file:// ?) There is a technical overview inside the notebook as its meant for demonstration over actual utility
https://tomlarkworthy.github.io/lopecode/notebooks/@tomlarkworthy_notes.html

sidenote: I wrote this slack message earlier in the day, decided not to send it coz there was a bug, recorded the draft message in notes, fixed the bug and pushed, and now the Github.io one now has this very slack message. I kind of like it coz its like an intro anyway, but a bit of a risk for me who publishes notebooks that I might accidentally transmit sensitive information.

🗨️ TodePond: 🎥 I am not dead yet

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-09

hello everyone i gave a talk about live programming, and what "liveness" means

🎥 I am not dead yet

I am not dead yet

Thinking Together

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-06

What are the all-time great projectional / structure editors? I'm particularly interested in:

tight focus on a specific language
really good autocomplete / hinting (ie: type-aware, don't show me unhelpful stuff at all)
pulling far away from the feel/experience of raw text typing, pushing toward "press a button, out comes exactly the program you wanted"

🗨️ josharian:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-06

An esolang idea that might (?) be fun to kick around.

The idea is to take advantage of the fact that LLMs are somewhat resilient in their inputs (can ignore typos, infer intent, etc.) to have a multi-level language.

Here’s a sketch, but I’m not wedded to any of it:

Programs are UTF-8. Each input code point is interpreted as an opcode. (Many opcodes are no-ops, probably most non-ASCII code points.) Some opcode(s) cause LLM execution of the program text.

The fun is writing a program whose opcodes do something useful, while still being natural-language-interpretable enough to use the second-level interpretation of the language as well.

(For the no-LLMs crowd, a similar idea is to have a pixel-based programming language…but the input is always pixels from rendering a textual program. Then you can execute either the pixels, or the text from which the pixels result, and bounce between the two.)

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-08

On Mastodon, maf shared the following discussion prompt:

[at 32m in the talk Hackover 2025 - Patterns in Chaos: How Data Visualisation Helps To See the Invisible, the speaker yote]…

brings up an interesting thought re readable visual design - that visualizations should encode the important variables using features that we've evolved to recognize instantly - on the most primitive level. The example given is rather simple: large vs small... But if we pull this a little further, it might lead us to some interesting, totally not explored visualizations:

using familiar vs unfamiliar faces as data points

using movement (especially movement of complex foreground against complex background) to highlight key area

proximity (stereoscopic images) - this could be combined with movement, so that important points move back & forth

we're really good at predicting trajectories of thrown objects - can this be utilized somehow?

Linking Together

🗨️ maf:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-04

I didn't expect that. At first sight it seemed to be AI generated but under further inspection turned out to be totally legit. Nice find.

The linked page lists a couple innovations that are introduced. Domains & overlaps is an interesting technique that blends static & dynamic typing. "Memlets" provide a primitive for maintaining state. A simple, universal & also flexible mechanism for merging multiple concurrent processes back into a single thread of execution... Something tells me that the author has some experience working with dataflow languages and is addressing the main pain points.

There is also a PDF with a spec of the language that can be downloaded for free from a couple online stores. I've scanned through it quickly.

It's a fairly technical academic approach that starts with a definition of a language.

It's also pretty comprehensive - covers semantics, execution model, graphical display, programming interfaces. IMO such a priori design doesn't work well in visual space. It's hard to predict what elements will turn out to be annoying and which will create unexpected synergies. But if this language gets actually implemented and undergoes a couple iterations... Who knows... I'll be watching it's development with great interest!

🗨️ Christopher Shank:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-04

"Disability Driven Development" from the Damaged Earth Catalog

Disability Driven Development (DDD) is a practice that reimagines computing from a disabled perspective, challenging its seemingly seamless and stable hegemonic operations. It asks who is left out of creating (and joyfully using) digital technology, and how this can be changed. It is a practice by and for those who did not get to shape computing to meet their needs.

Currently computing is stuck in a catch-22: while nobody is better qualified to create access solutions than disabled people themselves, systemic oppression and exclusion result in a situation where those with access needs rarely have the resources to envision or implement those solutions. The history of disability justice demonstrates an abundance of curb-cut effects—situations where focusing on access for one group, yields ideas, changes and solutions that are beneficial to many more people than those in the group the changes were originally meant for.

DDD addresses barriers of access to programming, which relies heavily on text, specifically the English language and the Latin alphabet, with specialized 'languages' that are structured in very specific ways. If that weren't enough of a barrier, the programming world deals with a deeply entrenched bigotry. The resulting lack of access to programming reduces the quality of software, since the creativity involved in thinking about computing through a disabled and trans*computational lens is excluded, denying disabled and other people the quality of life that software could help them achieve.

🗨️ Mattia Fregola: 👾 Dithering - Part 1

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-09

Great virtual story on dithering

Understanding how dithering works, visually.

Dithering - Part 1

Present Company

🗨️ Daniel Harris:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-06

MozFest Barcelona 2025 November 7-9! Anyone from Festival Of Confusion (that's here/us/we!) attending MozFest? Let's meet up! And if not MozFest what events are you attending over the next 6 months? That's 2 questions in one thread: hence the Confusion! 😉

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/11 Week 1

2025-11-03 13:54

Two Minute Week

🗨️ Kartik Agaram:

A little experiment with scrollbars

🎥 scrollbar

Share Your Work

🗨️ When Leggett: 📝 for Server User-Agents

https://its.whenthetimeca.me/p/for-server-user-agents

So I spent most of last week in Mountain View for the 41st Internet Identity Workshop. While I was there, I was advocating for something that I've been calling Server User-Agents, and I think they're a fundamental missing piece of architecture

This week I spent time putting my notes and conversations together and wrote a deep article about the concept, although it is still very early and intentionally a loose sort of spec. Its more a call for participation.

📝 for Server User-Agents

Notes from the 41st IIW

for Server User-Agents

🗨️ When Leggett:

I think its relevant to this community too, although maybe a little outside the center

🗨️ Eli:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-11-01

Here is a little work in progress snippet of a thing. It applies a heat map kinda color scheme to git diffs, the idea being that its rules can be tuned to call out places in the code that need closer attention when reviewing the diff. The rules are very much still a work in progress, and I'm super duper open to suggestions for ways to approach creating these rules.

Rambling video, be warned. I apologies for having the crunchiest, noisiest mouse wheel ever in the history of the recorded universe. Its like an ASMR halloween nightmare.

🎥 video

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

Notebook kit ships with themes, so I can reuse them for the Lopebook. I think they look better than the original!

Happy about how they are implemented, they use CSS imports, which resolve through es-module-shims, so I can serve them locally, and fallback to network. This means the local file includes just the current theme, and you do a network fetch only when changing themes, keeping the bundle size small and local-first.
Also thanks to the magic of es-module-shims, the CSS is fetched directly from Github raw URLs, as I can switch the content-type to test/css programatically. es-module-shims is so powerful for local-first stuff.

🎥 styles

Linking Together

🗨️ Tommy Palmer: 📝 Everything Is Television

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-29

I’m a bit of a lurker here (can’t even remember if I did an intro post) but I thought people might like this 📝 Everything Is Television

A theory of culture and attention

🗨️ guitarvydas:

a bunch of links to various books about smalltalk, maybe of interest (to me, part 4 of the blue book is quite interesting)

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 🎥 PROG Rock: Listening to old Lisp code

PROG Rock: Listening to old Lisp code

🗨️ Jon Tran: 📝 Five Pillars of Pipe

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-29

Folks who came out to the SF meetup, and others besides, might find this new pseudo-rebirth of cohost as a bunch of federated websites intriguing. I certainly do.

Present Company

🗨️ Jon Tran:

The company I work for has an open role to work on a programming language for mechanical CAD. The project was originally inspired by sketch-n-sketch, where you can draw/edit in the scene and it updates the code, and vice versa. We're also working on integrating a constraint solver. The GUI, interpreter, and solver are open source. I'll put details in the thread.

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/10 Week 4

2025-10-26 23:16

🌳 Cope and Drag: DSL for gradually improving diagrams 📝 Simple Assembler and Simple CPUs First 🎥 ROONS! A new marble computer

Share Your Work

🗨️ guitarvydas: 📝 Simple Assembler and Simple CPUs First

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-26

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

Nearly got the new serialisation format complete. Its self serializing and its forking fast!
The new foundations have less coupling to Observable. You can store files in it and read them using web APIs like fetch, XHR, dynamic imports and script tags. This is enough to boot Observable up and also to serve all its network calls in the std library locally without any modification to the 1st party source. I am considering spinning the serialisation format out as a separate project as its quite generic but I feel that would be a distraction so I will not but essentially it provides a virtual web inside a single static file. A bit like service-workers but without additional files or a webserver dependancy

🎥 forking fast

Thinking Together

🗨️ guitarvydas: 📝 Efficient Function Nesting

🗨️ Jonathan Frederickson:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-20

Folks, I'm looking for help finding a project that I ran across a while back that's adjacent to some of the visual-programming stuff we like here. It was a node-and-wire style infrastructure deployment tool, I think specifically for AWS, that would take care of setting up IAM rules for communication between components with wires connecting them.
I feel like I might have run across it either here, or while looking up something about the now-gone node-and-wire web interface for Canonical Juju.
Also starting to feel like I might have dreamt it up though!

Linking Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

Wow this has feels.
https://observablehq.com/@jwolondon/making-plot-sketchy

📷 image.png

🗨️ daniel g. siegel: 📝 Anticipate

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-21

Here's a take on how AI could really benefit and augment our thinking by exploring how it can support reflection and decision making rather than make choices for us: https://www.bigideainitiative.org/ideas/anticipate

This was done by a collaborator of ours, Niklas Muhs.

Anticipate explores how AI can augment design thinking by uncovering hidden assumptions and navigating uncertainty, leading to more informed and creative decisions.

Anticipate

🗨️ Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-26

"Cope and Drag" mini language for gradually constraining/improving diagrams 🍰. See paper for details but as usual with PLT blog, the post gives good background.

They built this in context of formal methods, but I think the mixed approach of "user can drag nodes + partially automate via constraints" has wider applicability.

📷 bildo.png

🗨️ Daniel Garcia: 🎥 ROONS! A new marble computer

ROONS! A new marble computer

Present Company

🗨️ Maikel:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-24

Next wednesday 29th October is our monthly FoC meetup (see the announcement channel for details).. we still have 2 spots for demo's left, who dares on this special edition?👻

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/10 Week 3

2025-10-20 10:08

🧬 Literate tracing 🧵 Undetermined Weaving with Machines 📑 Early Interpreters

Share Your Work

🗨️ Mariano Guerra: 🎥 vibecard: todo app speedrun using macros

live coding a todo app faster than the previous one with the help of a new vibecard feature: macros

vibecard: todo app speedrun using macros

🗨️ Matt Curtis: 🌐 Matt Curtis

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-13

since I'm starting my search for fulltime roles I did something I've managed to avoid doing for years now and made a (dundun) personal website

also trying to make more things that are sort of... just for me, you know?

anyway, idk if any of you have used Astro before (it's sort of similar to Gatsby, if you're familiar with that) but I used it for this and it's pretty neat. near first-class support for turning markdown into pages and querying and sorting collections of markdown. really great if you're building a text-heavy site. plus you can pull in components from your UI framework of choice, like React or Vue.

also got to play with a few SVG/CSS animation features I've never had the chance to fully use in a production site

would love to get any thoughts the folks here have! i feel like personal sites are sort of becoming more rare (might be just me, though)

The personal site of Matt Curtis

Matt Curtis

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

One lame issue is Notebook 2.0, it does not support importing other Notebook 2.0s which kinda breaks my plan.
Upvote the feature request here https://github.com/observablehq/notebook-kit/issues/96 (they will do it and its a matter of when)

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-19

Now that FoC stands for "feeling of computing", I can share this — I recently built a new website for Automerge, along with the absurdly talented designer Todd Matthews. The site includes an interactive demo and a bunch of illustrations that attempt to give newcomers a sense of what Automerge does. Like, on one level, we say what it does quite directly with words. But I think it's good to also try to, like, show that somehow, even though it's occasionally a bit abstract.

It was a deeply rewarding challenge, coming up with visuals where every detail (dash patterns, directions of lines, use of shapes) had to be both pleasing to look at but also true to the meaning, and consistent with the other meanings.

You can take something technical — "everyone has their own copy of the data, changes queue, you sync with your peers, everything converges on a consistent state" — and put that into imagery.

Now, of course, I want to actually use the imagery to do the technical thing.

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

Been thinking how Observable Notebook 2.0 format helps me. I conclude, that kind of transformation should NOT be in the low level. To run Notebook 2.0 you need compilers, but to run Lopecode the format is the low level raw JavaScript so Notebook 2.0 format puts specialised parsers/compilers in the loading path. Compilers and language choices should be in userspace, where they can be changed by the user. So I will revisit Notebook 2.0 when I have fixed the lower layer. I think it be neat as a userspace module.

So I return to where I left off. Bugs in importing from the net. I am redoing the foundational technology. I ditched importmaps and moved over to es-module-shims. It has allowed me to fix a problem that locally loaded models could not be deduped with network imported ones, which ends up causing semantic issues. importmaps are 1-way doors, es-module-shims gives you total control over import semantics at any point in time. Its a really amazing piece of software I recommend learning how it works. It has a C written Lezer parser doing the minimum parsing possible in the fastest possible way to read source code and swap "import" for "importShim" thus enclosing all import calls with a wrapper for customization.

Anyway, in the process I noticed defining the stdlib in the system space was also questionable because half those libs are broken (duckdb) and it takes up 50% of the system overheads for a large amount of extraneous code. Notebook 2.0 redid the stdlib => stdlib is subject to churn. So by a similar argument the stdlib definition should be in userspace too.

I spent a weekend on it and got surprisingly far. I can display some things, es-module-shim dedupuing seems to work and I added a userspace boot module that defines the stdlib and then loads the main module which I think its an improvement and allows the serialization format bootstrap process to be very small (26Kb). In that 26Kb you get a hot swapping reactive runtime and total control over ESM import semantics in a local-file.

📷 image.png

Thinking Together

🗨️ maf:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-15

Re adversarial interoperability - just figured out a fun approach. Most devices can share their screen over Miracast / AirPlay / something similar (last resort is HDMI cable). Most devices can also receive input from Bluetooth devices (alternatively, through USB cable). So as an alternative to accessibility APIs (or X11, or WinAPI input injection), one might set up another device that would spoof a Miracast display, a bluetooth mouse & a bluetooth keyboard. Such reflector could be implemented in a very cheap form factor (like a tiny ESP32) and allows another app on the original device to effectively bypass all access controls that the OS-es (especially mobile) impose.

It's not a security vulnerability per-se, since it requires the device owner to cooperate - just an interesting way to interop.

📷 shapes at 25-10-15 19.15.08.png

Linking Together

🗨️ Kartik Agaram:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-10-15

Literate tracing [pdf]

Augments Literate Programming with primitives for running a program on specific inputs and probing the values of specific variables after.

Augments the markup language with some way to define custom pictures. But I can't quite tell what the markup for that looks like.

📷 literate-tracing.png

🗨️ Kartik Agaram: 🎥 Micro Maker Series: Underdetermined Weaving with Machines