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

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/02 Week 1

2025-02-03 11:01

๐ŸŽฅ FoC Virtual Meetup 8 ๐Ÿ“ข HYTRADBOI 2025 ๐ŸŽน Sound As Pure Form

Two Minute Week

๐Ÿฆ‹ It's worth explaining how I'm making these semantic zoom demos with just CSS via Christopher Shank

๐Ÿงต conversation

I put together a brief writeup about how I've been doing semantic zoom with just a little CSS. I feel like I haven't seen a lot of recent visual programming interfaces (although there are certainly a lot of prior art) take advantage of fluid zooming and geometric encapsulation. Here's a couple small demos:

๐ŸŽฅ Screen Recording 1

๐ŸŽฅ Screen Recording 2

๐ŸŽฅ Screen Recording 3

Our Work

๐Ÿ“ Pure CSS Mixin for Displaying Values of Custom Properties via Roma Komarov

๐Ÿงต conversation

Finally, finished my most recent article (and published a package): kizu.dev/preview-mixin โ€” a lot of overcomplicated CSS, but one that makes it much easier to debug various dynamic values. For now, it is mostly for displaying them as text when possible, but I have a few ideas about some other visualizations. I already used it for a few experiments โ€” and seeing the values of what you're working on in real time really helps.

P1270001(1).jpg

๐Ÿ’ป levlo.com via Jarno Montonen

๐Ÿงต conversation

My natural language programming technology, Levlo, is now a "LLM Integration Platform". Updated the site: levlo.com. The Document Agents stuff is something I have not shared here before: levlo.com/document-agents. Any feedback appreciated!

๐Ÿ“ Of Interest via Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

FWIW: this is a reply I made elsewhere. Hoping it might be of interest here.

๐ŸŽ  Practicing graphical debugging using too many visualizations of the Hilbert curve via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

๐ŸŽฅ Video

๐ŸŽฅ Transclusions and Rectangles via Robin Allison

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Here is something I've been working on for a while that I've finally figured out how to do. You draw rectangles in the plane and 'transclusions' between them. Transclusions produce copies which display only in the target. Transclusions copy rectangles to produce new (cropped) rectangles. Transclusions also copy copied rectangles. Additionally, transclusions copy transclusions, which in turn copies transclusions and rectangles as well. Because rectangles can be moved around and resized every transclusion copies every rectangle and every transclusion ad infinitum at all times (though currently we stop after four steps). You can think of this structure as something like a syntax tree whose pieces can be moved in and out continuously at will, and two way transclusions as a kind of symbolic variable with the symbol missing. The math behind all this is really interesting too, but I probably don't want to go on about that here.

(cc @Elliot and Lu Wilson, thanks for inspiring me to think about rectangles and affine transformations! Also cc Jonathan Edwards since transclusions are very similar to inclusions from First Class Copy and Paste.)

Devlog Together

๐Ÿงฐ das2json.js via Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

Created yet another diagram-to-json converter in Javascript by asking Claude 3.5 nicely to convert the existing Odin version to Javascript.

๐Ÿ“ Draw.io via Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

I got live update messages to work in DPLWB. Draw.io -> choreographer.py -> spawn transpiler -> choreographer.py -> dplwb.html. The transpiler, while working, sends little updates (JSON objects (an array of one object consisting of a pair of strings)) to the choreographer which are immediately sent to dplwb.html. Final result is sent to dplwb.html as an array of JSON objects. Turn-around is "fast enough" (seconds) to be usable in bootstrapping and debugging this stuff more deeply. [DPLWB == Diagrammatic Programming Language WorkBench]

๐ŸŽฅ DPLWB with Live Updates

๐ŸŽ›๏ธ GOOD KNOB via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

I've been tinkering on a way to handle continuous numeric input. Or, in plainspeak, a knob โ€ฆ that you can turn. But it's, like, good , as far as knobs go. (Fake computer knobs, at least.)

  • It does the usual thingโ€ฆ you can drag up-and-down to turn the knob. Classic.
  • Oh! You can also drag left and right to turn the knob. That's nice.
  • Waitโ€ฆ you can crank in circles around the knob? And that works well too?
  • But but butโ€ฆ you can also crank in circles, like, anywhere on the screen!

The goal is "do what I mean" gestural input. Granted, it's currently dumb and could be better, which is why I'm still tinkering on it.

You can play with it here. Code is here.

๐ŸŽฅ GOOD KNOB

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Matt Rasmussen

๐Ÿงต conversation

I've been thinking about what libs and pkg indexes might look like as coding assistants become the norm. What if instead of packages providing a post_install.sh script (to regex config, add symlinks), they had a post_install.md prompt to help integrate the code into your app.

Libraries and packages indexes (especially language specific ones) have been a boon for code reuse. But they can only be used for code that can be cleanly abstracted. I often encounter chunks of code I wish could reuse as a lib, but I can't because I can't abstract it well enough

But if you wanted to package up a partial table schema and some prompt about how it could be rendered in a UI, then the package manager+coding assistant could auto merge the partial schema into the user's existing schema and even make the right UI updates to show the new fields

This might really help when building apps using coding assistants. Having assistants write so much code from scratch still feels unpredictable. What I really want is to be able to suggest from an index of code fragments and prompts which things to glue into my app.

Such a package index would encourage open source contribution of prompts plus pre-made code fragments. I'm interested in others thoughts.

๐Ÿ’ฌ Jim Meyer

๐Ÿงต conversation

AI-coding (chat) to create UIs โ€” working software you can own โ€” is the "worse is better" existential threat to traditional design tools and no-code.

This is as big, or bigger, than the "worse is better" that JavaScript pulled off for the Internet.

Chat is slow, but it gets the job done in a super accessible way, hence the "worse is better".

The real prize will be to combine the best parts of chat with the best parts of the canvas in design tools / no-code tools.

๐Ÿ’ฌ Oleksandr Kryvonos

๐Ÿงต conversation

I was sceptical about LLMs up till yesterday,

what changed? - arrival of Deepseek R1

Do I think it is "Sputnik moment" - not entirely,

I think it is more like an "Apple I moment" - in a sence that now more people can experiment with this idea,

And the tools are no longer in the hands of only big players.

I will explore the combined approach - I will use LLM with some simple workflows,

For example verification/critique of answer first.

And I will research the subject more carefully.

I do not have powerfull hardware - Apple M1 and SteamDeck ,

So I hope that these limitations will benefit me.

๐Ÿค” How might AI change programming? via Mariano Guerra

๐Ÿงต conversation

Interesting list of questions to think about

It will change it. But how?

๐Ÿ’ฌ Jason Morris

๐Ÿงต conversation

Is it neuro-symbolic AI if a generative AI system is used to generate a symbolic representation, which is then modified by a human user, and provided back to the generative AI in a later phase? Or does neuro-generative AI specifically require automated reasoning over the symbolic knowledge? I'm playing with a system for editing propositional argument maps that were generated by an LLM, and I'm not sure that counts. Is it "reasoning over symbolic knowledge" if a symbolic data structure is only being used to generate a graphical UI? It seems borderline, but I'm inclined to think not, and if we aren't reasoning over it, it doesn't count...

๐Ÿ’ฌ Jon Secchis

๐Ÿงต conversation

Hey, folks. I'm experimenting with a universal structured input interface for my research project. The idea is that commands/functions will provide a schema and invoking them prompts the user with a form. I'm pushing for super tight constraints on information density (I want interfaces to spread over time to save screen space, non-negotiable). Now since inputs are going to be generated I cannot have exceptional designs/behavior โ€“ it's all going to be rigorously data driven and I can only affect the design/experience by changing the data model. Below are two videos showing how a user would invoke a function for data input. Each video represents a distinct data model. The one with a tabular data model yields a short "time-to-first-field" (less overhead) interaction. The one with a composable tree model (much much more powerful) yields more overhead (2 more steps to reach the first field). Can you share your opinions? Not seeking any specific kind of feedback, just wanna hear your thoughts.

๐ŸŽฅ prototype editor short

๐ŸŽฅ prototype editor long

Content

๐Ÿข Umpteenth take on "Programming As Theory Building" via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

Umpteenth take on "Programming As Theory Building"

One thing I haven't thought to mention until now, in all the conversations about this paper. Between 2019 and 2021 I had perhaps the influential experience of my dayjob career. I got reorged to take over a legacy codebase, and after some initial struggles became expert with it to the extent it felt like my baby, something I'd written myself. And it wasn't just me; I gradually became the tech lead for the team, helped others understand it, and for a while[1] the team was able to own it and make improvements to it.

Factors that made this possible:

  • The codebase was relatively recent, just like in OP.
  • The codebase was well-designed, just like in OP.
  • One of the original authors was still in the company, and welcoming to questions. This one is not like OP. And it was crucial.

[1] What happened after? The company decided it was old, banned changes to it, chased a new shiny thing and let it decay. Companies find many, many ways to fail.

๐Ÿ“Š The Communal Plot | A Daily Visualization We All Build Together via Bill Mill

๐Ÿงต conversation

this is a small neat thing: perthirtysix.com/communal-plot-daily-poll

Interactively respond to a daily poll and see how your responses compare to others in real-time!

๐ŸŽน Sound As Pure Form via Mariano Guerra

๐Ÿงต conversation

Sound As Pure Form - a Forth-like language for audio synthesis using lazy lists and APL-like auto-mapping.

From the creator of SuperCollider

Other languages that inspired this one: APL, Joy, Haskell, Piccola, Nyquist, SuperCollider.

๐Ÿ“ The Future of Coding: ignore users, build for cyborgs via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

๐Ÿ“ The UNIX Time-Sharing System: D. M. Ritchie via Xavier Lambein

๐Ÿงต conversation

Expanding on @Jon Secchis's video from last week, here's a 50-page memo on the design of Unix, written by Ritchie

Present Company

๐ŸŽฅ Virtual Meetup 8 โ€ข January 22, 2025 via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Here's the recording of the Future of Coding Virtual Meetup 8. Once again, I've added notes and timestamps to the description. For next month, we're considering trying a different day/time than our usual Wednesday eu-evening/na-morning. Maybe a few hours later, maybe a weekend, who knows. Leave a reply in the thread if you haven't been able to join our other meetups but would love to join the next one. It might be nice to try a bunch of times and get different folks to cycle in/out.

๐Ÿ“ข HYTRADBOI 2025 is a fun online conference about databases, programming languages, and everything in between via Jamie Brandon

๐Ÿงต conversation

HYTRADBOI still has plenty of room for more lightning talks, so I'm going to extend the deadline to Feb 16. Check out hytradboi.com/2025#lightning-talk-buffet for details.

Also the program is up and tickets are live.


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 2025/01 Week 4

2025-01-27 18:10

๐ŸŽฅ Embedding a structured editor ๐Ÿฆ  Cells & More Cells ๐Ÿ› Debuggers & More Debuggers

Two Minute Week

๐ŸŽฅ Embedding a structured editor in blog and slides via Peter Saxton

๐Ÿงต conversation

Vimeo Thumbnail

I've Implemented an embedded version of my editor so I can structurally edit code snippets in blogs or in slides.

Using the effects in the web platform I can even send tweets from the snippets in a slide.

๐ŸŽฅ Assembly Kickoff ๐ŸŽฎ๐Ÿ’ป AUTOMAT DEVLOG 2 via Marek Rogalski

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Some news from Automat. I'm tackling the problem of control flow now. I think its the central issue for establishing interoperability between different types of software. Knowing when to continue work in parallel vs wait for completion, how long to wait before giving up, whether to retry, alert or crash, when to save & restore state, etc. Generally all the things called "glue code". They're not essential to "solving" any specific problem, but are still necessary for any practical application of any solution. I believe that with proper design all of those functions could be implemented as virtual devices, intuitive enough that folks without formal education could use. That will take time though. This is my interim solution . It's meant to allow folks with sufficient dedication to implement the missing functions, without scaring them off. Most importantly it only requires three virtual devices to achieve virtually all control flow primitives (Instruction, Instruction Library & Assembler) so it's feasible to do in a relatively short time.

I'm also attaching a WIP design for the "Instruction Library" object. If you're bored you may try to guess what which icon matches each x86_64 register (due to lack of space, only two REX registers are shown) :)

Our Work

๐Ÿ“ Cells: Want to show a grid of cells on a screen? via Lu Wilson

๐Ÿงต conversation

i made another explainable about how to draw a grid of cells

๐ŸŽฅ Making Cell Episode 1 via Federico Pereiro

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Yesterday I recorded the first episode of Making Cell, which is basically going to be about building cell from the ground up, live. In this episode, I explain the basics and put some The Smiths in the background.

๐Ÿ’ฌ John Christensen

๐Ÿงต conversation

At yesterday's meetup I demoed a node and wire tool I'm working on in the scientific computing domain.

@Mรกrton Gunyhรณ had an interesting question, so I'm sharing here in case anyone has any related thoughts:

do you use some graph algorithm to figure out what needs to be recomputed, or do you keep all intermediate values in the wires in memory? I imagine the latter would get pretty heavy pretty fast.

Currently I've gone with the simple/naive approach of just keeping everything in memory. This is nice because any long-running nodes at the top of the network don't need to recompute when their descendants need to re-run. This does mean that you can run out of memory quickly if you are dealing with large pieces of data though.

I'm not sure what my long-term solution is yet. Currently my thoughts are to start dropping/caching-to-disk large pieces of data as memory usage to get too high, and recompute when they are needed again. In the meantime, it's not too bad for the primary use cases I have in mind to simply be content with working with a subset of data that fits into memory.

image.png

๐Ÿ“ File Systems: The Original Hypermedia via Jon Secchis

๐Ÿงต conversation

Wow, lot's of great stuff you all are posting here! So exciting ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

I'd like to share something too, it embraces the "scaling-down" sentiment I am seeing in other projects here.

I designed a semantic hypermedia data structure (FIFO) with a "higher-order" syntax, allowing form to be transferred across text/gui substrates. The general idea was to see how closely you can emulate hypermedia documents using just semantic and semiotic rules. These rules are then encoded in a rendering pipeline to systemically present the data on the screen. It sounds fancy but in practice it's very mundane.

FIFO's syntax is actually inspired by the file system information model, which, as we know, has these properties, allowing trees to be rendered systemically and consistently in whatever style, but without any loss in meaning. Not only file systems, though, this is a very pervasive modality, such as the universality of frequencies in relation to the particularities of timbre, or natural language itself, which is very malleable in terms of encoding, preserving meaning mostly intact regardless of representation. This sort of thing is only possible with models that are purely abstract, immaterial, but yet well defined.

Now this is not just for fun, it can be very useful to have a document language like in some scenarios, for instance, to very cheaply and quicky compose and distribute multimedia information. I made my website using FIFO, and also a portfolio for a friend of mine. It's just a proof of concept at this point, I invested very little in the rendering part, just enough to make it usable. In the future I'd like to make an editor for it, for now I just write it by hand. You can check the links below to see it in practice. Before anyone asks why bother with all the work to have a worse version of markdown, consider that: 1) this is not markup but a data structure, it has it's own in-memory DOM and query interface, 2) it's extensible, 3) it's hierarchical, so you can have directories in the document, 4) it's mathematically rigorous, 5) is composable, and some more things. The fact it looks like a basic document is consequential, as the whole idea was to capture the stereotype but starting from a different principles. There can be different visual renditions, too, I'm just not so much creative in this department.

visual repr: jon.work/og

text repr: jon.work/og/index.fifo.txt

visual repr: jon.work/fifo

text repr: jon.work/fifo/index.fifo.txt

visual repr: henriquecesar.pages.dev

text repr: henriquecesar.pages.dev/index.fifo.txt

๐Ÿค A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet via Mariano Guerra

๐Ÿงต conversation

I wrote a blog post undoing one by one the tricks I used to write a Wasm compiler for a Reverse Polish Notation calculator that fits in a tweet

Devlog Together

๐ŸŽ  Infrastructure for Graphical Debugging via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

4-minute video update on my "Emacs for visualizing Lร–VE apps": it no longer looks very much like Emacs at all. I think all it shares with Emacs is a flat namespace of handler functions that you can compose to create windows with different experiences around shared data.

๐Ÿ’ฌ #devlog-together@2025-01-07

๐Ÿ’ฌ Jimmy Miller

๐Ÿงต conversation

As I was trying to build a debugger (well, a frontend to lldb right now) for my language, in my language (beagle), I was getting a weird bug I couldn't figure out. So I decided to build a little compiler explorer tool for it. The left is the code, the middle is my (already register allocated) IR, and the right is the machine code. (Don't look too close, there are some bugs in how I print the machine code like and doesn't apply the shift).

The UI is incredibly ugly, because hopefully this is the last UI I need to build for my language that isn't built in the language itself. Using the UI I was able to figure out the bug. It turns out, if I had a compilation cycle with code > 3 pages of memory, I wasn't doing the accounting properly and writing the over existing code. Ironically, the way I built this tool meant, I saw my code was right, but the code I was stepping into the debugger was wrong. So the tool showed me the bug by the absence of the bug...

Now I'm continuing on to building the debugger in itself. Having a real application is helping me realize features I need and forcing me to think about what I want my language to feel like to program.

Screenshot 2025-01-20 at 12.05.13โ€ฏPM.png

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

I added the missing ability to upload File Attachments into the HTML bundle thing (this also adds the ability to add local files to Observable notebooks as its all userspace).

I am somewhat at a fork in the road about what to do about state. I prototype a cell mutating itself, and now I also have the ability to programmatically write binary blobs into itself. IndexDB is not so relevant here because every time you fork, you lose that kind of browser state as the domain switches).

So should I use cells to store state? they are cool because they are reactive and programmable, or do I use files to store state? Files are a bit more classic, maybe a bit easier to eject and upload into a different notebook. I think I lean towards files as the long term data store, seems like it would be easier to interop with other systems.

๐ŸŽฅ Lope

๐Ÿ“ฑ A program on my phone with a custom debug UI via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

A program on my phone with a custom debug UI.

Pretty hilarious. After spending a week creating spaces for custom debug UIs, I realize a different fork can already do all that. On my phone. By repurposing a script I wrote a year ago.

I did deliberately design screens in Lua Carousel to support sharing and exchanging data. But I didn't appreciate all the benefits.

๐Ÿ’ฌ #devlog-together@2025-01-19

๐ŸŽฅ hilbert debug phone spedup

๐Ÿ”ค Sand Letters via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

I'm tinkering on a little sand experiment with @Elliot. Without dipping too far into spoilers, you have a small selection of tools you can use to fill the screen with grains of sand and then move them around, with brushes (of a sort) that each have a bit of logic (eg: scatter the sand randomly, push the sand downwards, merge sand grains together). What's fun about these brushes (of a sort) is that they apply some behaviour that feels like a computation. So you sort of brush your computation over some data (sand).

One possibility I've been mulling, that I'd love to hear some ideas for, is a brush that does cellular automata. The brush might use some global grid (discrete) or sense of proximity (continuous), and apply some CA-esq rules depending on the density of the sand. Then you'd just brush that computation onto the sand to advance the state of the CA. Maybe each brush stroke advances the CA one step wherever you apply it, or maybe the CA runs continuously but only where you're brushing. The thing I'm presently brainstorming isโ€ฆ how might one specify the CA-esq rules just using sand and brushes?

sand letters

sand letters

๐Ÿ—จ๏ธ Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

With ๐Ÿ’ฌ #devlog-together@2025-01-16 on my mind, here's an example single-file html with some support for annotation. Save it locally, swap out the text with some stuff to read, take notes on it as you read, save your notes locally. Thanks @Eli Mellen and Tom Larkworthy in particular for the inspiration. Based on Cristรณbal Sciutto's note example. Suggestions and feature ideas welcome.

๐ŸŽ  building out a custom debug UI via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

One nice thing about building out a custom debug UI as I'm writing a program: it turns into an explorable explanation by the time I have a working program. Here's a (silent) explorable explanation for a simple program that I nonetheless struggled to get right.

Each screen is a hundred lines beyond Lua Carousel (which has existed before this whole idea of debug UIs was a twinkle in my eye)

๐ŸŽฅ freewheeling debug

๐Ÿ“” Added a context menu via Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

Added a context menu so it was a bit more obvious how to add new cells. hosted page is here. Maybe this is enough webpage stuff for now and I should start porting my notebooks. Its getting a bit laggy now as well which I think is because the reactivity is not fine grained for most of the UI (underlying calculations are though).

๐ŸŽฅ context menu

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ“ Whence Bloat? via Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

Doodles for discussion towards simplification of computers for non-programmers.

๐Ÿ’ฌ Karl Toby Rosenberg

๐Ÿงต conversation

I found that indentation in programming languages like Python, at least with some of my students, seems to be a point of confusion. This idea of introducing spatial thinking and jumping around seems to conflict with our learned way of reading text on a page. The closest thing is textual paragraph indentation.

Maybe there are some studies that contradict me, but couldnโ€™t braces or begin/ends actually be better? Or something built-into the editor.

Why couldnโ€™t this be acceptable?

# instead of:

if bla:

    do_bla()

   if blabla:

       do_blabla()

   else:

       other()

else:

    other()



# do

if bla {

do_bla()

if blabla() {

do_blabla()

}

else {

other()

}

else {

other()

}

Okay itโ€™s hard to read, but it makes me think: any block of code could really be its own function, and suppose we had a kind of function that was purely an inline macro to jump to without any stack rules. The goal would just be to make code look as procedural/linear as possible.

if bla do_bla() else other()



#define do_bla somewhere somehow in a way that keeps the same scope without param/stack rules

Sure this would probably require more annoying steps and jumps for some, but I do wonder how it might impact early learners or maybe prove useful (or not useful) for understanding control flow

Maybe if an editor could automatically inline code folding off and off with these macrosโ€ฆ

Probably more of a structured/dynamic editor that isnโ€™t just pure text.

Iโ€™m sure this path has been followed before, but I wonder.

Itโ€™s really just closer to ASM languages with the conditional jumps and islands of code. Strangely, I find those pretty not so hard to understand. No nesting.

๐Ÿ“ Three thoughts on the summer of AI via Federico Pereiro

๐Ÿงต conversation

Hi everyone! I just posted a short article with three thoughts on the "AI summer": federicopereiro.com/ai-summer

If anyone has similar (or contrasting) experiences, I'd be glad to hear them!

  • UI through AI: the possibility of replacing more parts of the UI with AI
  • LLMs shrinking the area of training with own data
  • Temperature rising

๐Ÿ’ฌ Xavier Lambein

๐Ÿงต conversation

A thought occurred to me while checking Kartik Agaram's post on #devlog-together A Web page is a convenient medium to write a small application for yourself and distribute it. But it's also limiting, because of the browser. You can't easily edit local files, requests are limited by CORS, you can lose data if the browser's cache is emptied, etc.

So I'm wondering: is there a sort of "browser for local apps", which would be just a webview with some of the browser's limitations lifted? For example, I could use Kartik's single-page app for annotating text, but instead of saving my changes by downloading the saved file, it would use the filesystem directly.

๐Ÿ’ฌ Jon Secchis

๐Ÿงต conversation

I just realized that if browsers could display notification badges when a site is closed and showed it on the bookmarked item in the fav bar while the site is not open (no tabs), that'd be super cool and useful! Like I could visibly place sites I commonly expect traffic and allow them to fetch notifications in the background such as this very platform, email, etc. Then I wouldn't need to open the site, "waste" time/resources just to check for new messages and such

Content

๐Ÿ“ From Burnout to Breakthrough - CoRecursive Podcast via Tim Schafer

๐Ÿงต conversation

Hedy: Textual programming for the classroom

๐Ÿ“ From Burnout to Breakthrough - CoRecursive Podcast

Can you imagine risking your career to making coding easier to learn? Meet Felienne Hermans, a professor who did just that by stepping beyond academia to redefine coding education. Disillusioned by her research's limited impact, Felienne discovered a new calling in teaching coding to underserved students. Her journey led to the creation of Hedy, a programming language designed to dismantle... [โ€ฆ]

๐Ÿค” What is Code? by Paul Ford via Jasmine Otto

๐Ÿงต conversation

god, this longread on the software industry hasn't aged in a decade

Somehow it keeps working out. The industry is always promising to eat itself, to come up with a paradigm so perfect that we can all stop wasting our time and enter a world of pure digital thought. It never happens.

it's very much a bird's eye view but there's a fantastic balance between the beauty and the ravenous ouroborous

Languages are liquid infrastructure. You download a few programs and, whoa, suddenly you have a working Clojure environment. Which is actually the Java Runtime Environment. You grab an old PC thatโ€™s outlived its usefulness, put Linux on it, and suddenly you have a powerful Web server.

๐Ÿงฑ Pantograph, a structure editor via Xavier Lambein

๐Ÿงต conversation

Very cool work on a typed structure editor presented yesterday at POPL: Pantograph, a structure editor

With a demo available online here: pantographeditor.github.io/Pantograph I just worked through the tutorial myself, it's very pleasant to use overall.

๐ŸŽฅ UNIX before Linux (1982) via Jon Secchis

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Worth rewatching and reflecting on what we had vs what we have now. Can be pretty chilling depending on how you frame the comparison

๐Ÿฆ Alex Warth (@alexwarth) on X via Steve Dekorte

๐Ÿงต conversation

๐Ÿฆ Alex Warth (@alexwarth) on X: Sketchpad running on the iPad!

(This is my plug for the @inkandswitch wrapper, check it out at https://t.co/bkx9dhM17r)

Tweet Thumbnail

๐Ÿ’ก Expert CSS: The CPU Hack via Roma Komarov

๐Ÿงต conversation

Finally spent time understanding what's going on in dev.to/janeori/expert-css-the-cpu-hack-4ddj

(but only for the main technique, not the way it is used for the demos in the article, like in the Game of Life demo โ€” codepen.io/propjockey/pen/NWEYdjY (Chrome only))

Basically, re-evaluation of state in pure CSS (turing complete, all of that) using the interactions between animations and custom properties (and, currently, Chrome-only details of their implementation)

Present Company

๐Ÿ—ฝ The NYC Tech/Art/Games Triangle via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

The NYC Tech/Art/Games Triangle


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 2025/01 Week 3

2025-01-20 11:30

๐Ÿค” Where Should Visual Programming Go? ๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป Reactive coding substrate that looks like a webpage ๐Ÿฆ Influence a future Alan Kay talk

Two Minute Week

Our Work

๐Ÿค” Where Should Visual Programming Go? via Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

Making direct manipulation diagrams fast to develop.

So this work was motivated by "Where Should Visual Programming Go?". I kinda thought dataviz driven development was a step in the right direction but some people here though unidirectional was too limiting. So it made me think about what a bidirection diagram was.

Grammar of graphics provides a nice abstraction of what a scale actually is. It's a mapping from dataspace to pixel space. A bidireciton diagram might go in the other direction, mouse movements (actions) are mapped back to changes in data space. Once you consider libraries like Plot are very liberal on what scales they support: non-linear, categorical etc. then the ability to manipulate data points through a diagram is pretty compelling. You stop thinking about data as external data but as control surfaces that live in a weird high dimensional configuration space of your choosing.

Inverting scales is reasonably easy, once that general primitive is in place then you get a shit ton of possible gizmos that take very little time to make look good and work because all the heavy lifting is done in the other direction using an off-the-shelf dataviz library.

Full explanation and code in a notebook although the one-weird invert trick is quite general.

๐ŸŽฅ direct manipulation

๐Ÿ“ Speech AI has 10xโ€™d: purpose, evaluation, and products via Kilian Butler

๐Ÿงต conversation

I wrote a blog post for anyone building AI models, rethinking human-computer interaction, or just looking to build truly great speech products:

โ€ข Why TTS is finished as a model paradigmโ€”and whatโ€™s next with multimodal speech synthesis.

โ€ข How model evaluations must evolve to focus on communication, not just naturalness.

โ€ข Why product success hinges on understanding speechโ€™s purpose: meaningful user intent.

๐Ÿ“ Composition to the Rescue via Guyren Howe

๐Ÿงต conversation

Devlog Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

I've been trying some new stuff lately:

  • Decker. I'd for some reason assumed it was some npm and/or wasm monstrosity (perhaps because it's so dang inefficient), but it turns out it's nice zero-dependency Javascript in a single html file! And that's in addition to the native version that uses SDL just like Lร–VE. So in some ways it has a better cross-platform story than Lร–VE, which is non-trivial to run on iOS.
  • Rust. I spent some time playing around with a Lร–VE-inspired game engine called ggez, and the much more basic wgpu crate. The promise here: Rust seems to be evolving some pretty nice cross-platform tooling, so in time we may end up with a world where it's easy to cross-compile to any platform. Of course, the compile step is not ideal, but it promises to yield much more efficient binaries that might run on lower-end devices like old phones. The eco-system is not quite there, and the npm-like dependency explosions are rough. But I want to try to look outside my comfort zone. It's possible the way forward isn't unique-snowflake minority platforms like Lร–VE or Decker, but just to use a majority platform with better taste, taking the time to understand and curate the landscape of dependencies.

๐ŸŽฅ decker

๐Ÿง‘๐Ÿฝโ€๐Ÿ’ป Lopefile: a reactive coding substrate that is configured to look like a webpage via Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

I added Plot and therefore d3 to the hermatic notebook self hosting html bundle thing, also uploaded it to a domain.

UI is a bit rough for adding cells, bit its quite ok at editing existing content.

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ“ Practical Parallelism via Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

As I understand it, to achieve true concurrency on a single computer, you need to ensure that app code sits in one of the core-private caches (L1, L2, but not L3). Thoughts

๐Ÿฆ‹ I just asked over on bsky: via Gregor

๐Ÿงต conversation

I just asked over on bsky:

I'm morbidly fascinated by Business Process Modeling. On some level it's exactly what I want: end user programming.

But then the only people I heard speak positively about it are vendors, which is very much not what I want

It's also a non-topic in the alt programming circles I frequent. Any takes?

I guess I could've just put it here. Curious if anyone has thoughts on it

๐Ÿฆ Unique chance to influence a future Alan Kay talk! via Anselm Eickhoff

๐Ÿงต conversation

Hey folks!

Unique chance to influence a future Alan Kay talk!

  • If you could ask Alan Kay anything, what would you ask?

Twitter thread / Bluesky thread

  1. Now he has some questions for you!

Twitter thread / Bluesky thread

Feel free to reply here as well

Present Company

๐Ÿ“ Cat Hicks (@grimalkina@mastodon.social) via Jasmine Otto

๐Ÿงต conversation

๐Ÿ“ Cat Hicks (@grimalkina@mastodon.social)

We are designing a new research project in the Developer Success Lab, and we're seeking to understand software engineers' experiences with incidents ! Good, bad, ugly, all of it!

Have a big story or strong POV on this? We're bringing together a small community group for a one time zoom session, to share stories and help us learn. You'll directly influence what the lab studies on this.

You can let us know if you're interested here (more details below):

Incidents community-group


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 2025/01 Week 2

2025-01-13 14:41

๐Ÿ’ป Moldable Webfile ๐Ÿ“ Coding is not the new literacy ๐Ÿ– Wrapper: Better web-based prototypes for iPad

Our Work

๐Ÿ“ AI risk I donโ€™t see discussed via Guyren Howe

๐Ÿงต conversation

Hopefully this is regarded as sufficiently on topicโ€ฆ

Iโ€™ve started a personal blog. My first post is on an AI risk I donโ€™t see discussed.

๐Ÿ’ป Moldable Webfile (prototype II) via Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

tomlarkworthy.github.io/lopecode/webpage.html

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

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

๐Ÿ– Wrapper: Better web-based prototypes for iPad via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

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

So, if you have a Mac, an iPad, and an Apple Pencilโ€ฆ and you want to do some experiments with rich gestural interfacesโ€ฆ and you want to write those experiments in JSโ€ฆ and you're in a hurryโ€ฆ then this project might be useful for you :)

๐Ÿ“ The Organization of Digital Information Systems via Federico Pereiro

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

Here it goes: github.com/altocodenl/todis

๐Ÿ’ฌ Cole Lawrence

๐Ÿงต conversation

Iโ€™m working on a new way of writing โ€œdenseโ€ UI inspired by MVVM + ECS, and this is the debugger for the โ€œView Model Componentsโ€ (VMCs?) in the UI

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

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

Here, Iโ€™ve taken a video of just the โ€œdebuggerโ€ I developed in the last two days to observe the state of all these components for each item in the world.

๐ŸŽฅ Phosphor

Devlog Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

๐ŸŽฅ motley message

๐Ÿ’ฌ Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ pendulum

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ direct manipulation

Reading Together

๐Ÿ“ Naur: Programming as Theory Building via Federico Pereiro

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Loved the article and disagreed with almost everything. Sharing my private thoughts without polish or much justification, in case someone's interested in a dissenting opinion ๐Ÿ˜…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content

๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿซ PhD in Digital Movement for Interaction Design via Joel Gethin Lewis

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿฆ GalaxyBrain. A powerful JSON-based information operating system via Marcin Ignac

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ“ Coding is not the new literacy via Oleksandr Kryvonos

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ Proofs without words: the example of the Ramanujan continued fraction via Mattia Fregola

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Proofs without words: the example of the Ramanujan continued fraction

๐ŸŽฅ SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 โ€“ Real-Time Live! via Dany

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Interactive Music Effect Playground, may be of interest.

Present Company

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tomas Petricek

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ“ž Call for Case Studies via Vitorio Miliano

๐Ÿงต conversation

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


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 2025/01 Week 1

2025-01-06 13:59

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ FoC #74 โ€ข Is the Whole Universe a Computerโ„ข? ๐ŸŽฅ Fibonacci sequence in visual editor ๐Ÿงฌ undulant interface for genetic music manipulation

Two Minute Week

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ moldable website

Our Work

๐Ÿธ todepond.com/code via Lu Wilson

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

This is...

DIALOGUES ON NATURAL CODE

by me and Dave Ackley

Please enjoy!!!!!

๐Ÿฆ Hey Gadget, build me a CRM via Harry Brundage

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ Fibonacci sequence in visual editor via Peter Saxton

๐Ÿงต conversation

Vimeo Thumbnail

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

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

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

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ FoC Episode 74 โ€ข Is the Whole Universe a Computerโ„ข? via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

FoC Episode 74 โ€ข Is the Whole Universe a Computerโ„ข?

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

Devlog Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ motley wm

๐ŸชŸ ๐Ÿ‘‹๐Ÿฝ Hello Golden layout 2.6.0 via Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ“ ๐Ÿ‘‹๐Ÿฝ Hello Golden layout 2.6.0

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

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ My Movie

๐Ÿ’ฌ Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

Fooling around with visual animation as a way to describe algorithms (instead of strict linearization and time-flattening of written code). Inspired by Kartik Agaram's comments and this ๐Ÿ’ฌ #thinking-together@2025-01-02. I'm not sure where this is going, but, I'm looking at the Wick editor, Apple Keynote, etc.

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

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

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ“ Towards Diagram Compilation via Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ’ฌ KP Kaiser

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

Untitled (1).png

๐Ÿ’ฌ Daniel Harris

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Content

๐Ÿงฌ synopsis-04: lobe ui via Christopher Shank

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Present Company

๐Ÿƒ this thing via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

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


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 2024/12 Week 5

2024-12-30 13:30

๐Ÿ•ถ๏ธ Visualizer: Own Cell Renderer ๐Ÿ“š Advent of Papers (2024) ๐ŸŒณ Tree Calculus

Our Work

๐ŸŽจ Splash is a colour format via Lu Wilson

๐Ÿงต conversation

i made an explainable for a weird colour format i use

Splash

todepond.com/lab/splash

๐Ÿ’ป all pairs via misha

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ FUTURE OF CODING: INTERVIEW via Lu Wilson

๐Ÿงต conversation

Bonus episode alert!

FUTURE OF CODING: INTERVIEW

(featuring @Philippa Markovics)

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

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

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

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

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

Devlog Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Jimmy Miller

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

live.gif

๐Ÿ’ฌ Roma Komarov

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

๐ŸŽฅ Screen Recording

๐Ÿ•ถ๏ธ Visualizer: Own Cell Renderer via Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ’ป just stage every change in git repo via Oleksandr Kryvonos

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

github.com/uprun/git-auto-commit

๐Ÿ˜ Emacs via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

An environment for visualizing programs

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

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

Examples, etc. in ๐Ÿงต

Reading Together

๐Ÿ“š Advent of Papers (2024) via Jimmy Miller

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Iacob Nasca

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Content

๐ŸŒณ Tree Calculus via Mariano Guerra

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

anyone has any opinions on this?

One operator. Trivial semantics. Turing complete. Intensional.

โœ๏ธ Drakon via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ“ alt.chi via Andrew McNutt

๐Ÿงต conversation

Kind of a weird link, but:

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


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 2024/12 Week 4

2024-12-23 10:16

๐Ÿ›ก๏ธ Unusual programming environment for counting ๐ŸŽฅ Incremental Graph Code ๐Ÿน tldraw computer

Our Work

๐Ÿ›ก๏ธ Droste's Lair is an unusual programming environment for building and counting mathematical structures via Elliot

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Features

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

  • use sigillic incantations, delve into recursive caverns

image.png

๐ŸŽฅ Incremental Graph Code (IGC) Introduction via Thomas van Binsbergen

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

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

Devlog Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ lopebook

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Alex North

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

๐Ÿ’ฌ Jason Morris

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Content

๐Ÿน tldraw computer via Maikel van de Lisdonk

๐Ÿงต conversation

computer.tldraw.com ... I think it's awesome! And I am a bit jealous but in a good way ๐Ÿ˜„ .. very inspirational and I think this is what the chatgpt canvas should have been


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 2024/12 Week 3

2024-12-16 00:24

๐Ÿ“บ Variable design ๐Ÿ“ข FoC Virtual Meetup 2025.1 ๐Ÿ“ Problems people are motivated by

Our Work

๐Ÿงฎ Pictures of Pensions โ€“ Calc with Dec via Declan

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

Happy to hear any feedback or suggestions.

๐ŸŽฅ Live Coding an Interactive Tool with Val Town & AI via Mariano Guerra

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Live Coding Interactive Tools with Val Town & LLMs

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

First FoC tool collab? ๐Ÿ™‚

๐Ÿ–ฉ Mortgage Calculator via edward

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

Devlog Together

๐Ÿ“ RT - Now What? Towards Higher Level Syntax for Programming Languages via Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ synced cells

๐Ÿ“ Building A DSL - Example DSL That Generates Python Code via Paul Tarvydas

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ“ Problems people are motivated by via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

I still think about this every once in a while.

problems.png

problems2.png

๐ŸŽฅ Marcin Ignac, Variable.io - Variable design /KIKK24 via Jack Rusher

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

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

๐Ÿค–

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Present Company

๐Ÿ“ข Virtual Meetup 2025.1 via Maikel van de Lisdonk

๐Ÿงต conversation

Hi, on wednesday 22th jan 2025 (16:00 UTC) we will have our first online meetup of 2025 and we will continue in the same format with short live demo's and presentations from our community .. the meetup is also on Virtual Meetup 2025.1 .. if anyone wants to give a demo about their project or give a short talk then please let us know here in the thread of this message ๐Ÿ˜€


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 2024/12 Week 2

2024-12-08 23:09

๐Ÿ‘‹ Staying Observable ๐Ÿ“ Research as leisure activity ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป Malleable Systems Collective

Two Minute Week

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ Edit Dependancies

๐Ÿ‘‹ Editor with Exporter via Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ Tom Larkworthy's Video - Dec 7, 2024

Our Work

๐Ÿ“• โ˜ž Computation and Wonder, Soon in Book Form! via Sam Arbesman

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ“ โ˜ž Computation and Wonder, Soon in Book Form!

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

๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ Smallweb - Your internet folder via Achille Lacoin

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

๐Ÿ“ Smallweb - Your internet folder

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

Devlog Together

๐Ÿ’ก December Adventure via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

๐Ÿ’ป Markov Chain Monte Carlo via Tom Lieber

๐Ÿงต conversation

๐Ÿ˜Œ๐Ÿ˜Œ๐Ÿ˜Œ

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

๐ŸŽฅ tug-of-war mcmc and optimizations

๐Ÿ’ฌ Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

I was a bit worried because I discovered quite late in the day that my decompiler/compiler pair was stripping comments. Urgh, of course, 'cos its AST based. Luckily, escodegen and acorn do have comment preserving features, and Observable's acorn wrapper passes on arguments in a way that means I could get comments round tripping too ๐Ÿ˜… Close call, programming without comments would be a fairly substantial deficiency.

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ’ฌ Christopher Shank

๐Ÿงต conversation

๐ŸŽฅ What if visual programming interfaces had weather?

๐Ÿฆ‹ ezhik.me via Ezhik

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

๐ŸŽฅ Screen Recording

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ“ UTF-8 in usernames via Nilesh Trivedi

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ“ Schnieder's algorithm via John Christensen

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

Content

๐Ÿ“ Research as leisure activity via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

Research as leisure activity

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

๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป Malleable Systems Collective via Duncan Cragg

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ“ Malleable Systems Collective

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

๐Ÿ“ Welcome to the forum

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

๐Ÿ“‘ Roelof Knol | art portfolio via Greg Bylenok

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿชด beautifully provocative via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

<https://bsky.app/profile/marcinignac.bsky.social|@marcinignac.bsky.social>: Graph as root of a procedural system.

Present Company

๐Ÿ“ FutureOfCoding starter pack for Mastodon/Fediverse via Nilesh Trivedi

๐Ÿงต conversation

I put together FutureOfCoding starter pack for Mastodon/Fediverse.

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

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


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 2024/12 Week 1

2024-12-01 23:30

๐ŸŽฅ Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing ๐ŸŽˆ Smalltalk & LLMs ๐ŸŽฅ FoC Virtual Meetup Video

Two Minute Week

๐ŸŽฅ Node output preview when dragging values on edges via Maikel van de Lisdonk

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

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

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

Our Work

๐ŸŽฅ Mariano Guerra & Tudor Girba - LLMs & Smalltalk - UK Smalltalk User Group via Francisco Garau

๐Ÿงต conversation

The videos from last month presentation are now available:

[:kind | โ€˜Regards from โ€™, kind ] value: โ€˜The UK Smalltalk User Groupโ€™.

๐ŸŽฅ Mariano Guerra on LLMs

MarianoGuerra - LLM - 30-Oct-2024

๐ŸŽฅ Tudor Girba on LLMs

Tudor Girba - LLM - 30-Oct-2024

๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ smallweb via Achille Lacoin

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

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



export default new Smallblog({

  siteTitle: "Pomdtr's Blog",

  defaultAuthors: ["pomdtr"],

});

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

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

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

๐Ÿ“ fishtower.conradgodfrey.com via Conrad Godfrey

๐Ÿงต conversation

Hi,

Sharing fish tower

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

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

fishtower.conradgodfrey.com

๐Ÿ‘“ LookAtThat: Render source code in 3D, for macOS and iOS via Ivan Lugo

๐Ÿงต conversation

Hello Future of Coding folks!

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

github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

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

Project Screenshot

Devlog Together

๐Ÿ’ฌ Christopher Shank

๐Ÿงต conversation

"make illegal states unconnectable"

๐ŸŽฅ Screen Recording

๐Ÿ“ github.com/uprun/git-auto-commit via Oleksandr Kryvonos

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

this can be solved with more granual commits,

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

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

๐Ÿ›ธ Eclector via Konrad Hinsen

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

The code for my demo available on Codeberg.

๐ŸŽฅ Demo

๐Ÿ’ป exporter via Tom Larkworthy

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

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

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

image.png

๐Ÿ’ฌ Jason Morris

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐Ÿ’ฌ Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

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

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

addition.png

Thinking Together

๐Ÿ“ github.com/bellard/quickjs via John Flockton

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Content

๐ŸŽฅ ABI-DOS Announcement Trailer via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

Here's a lil circuit simulation game that looks pretty neat โ€” ABI-DOS

EDIT: Ended up collecting a handful of these.

๐Ÿ“ Viewing document history is now easy as scrubbing through a video. via Mattia Fregola

๐Ÿงต conversation

Pretty great thing I wish I had through life:

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

Usable on lex.page

๐Ÿ“ƒ Feels Like Paper via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing via Konrad Hinsen

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

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

๐ŸŽฅ Handmade Cities via misha

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

๐ŸŽฅ UIST'09: Bonfire: a nomadic system for hybrid laptop-tabletop interaction via Mariano Guerra

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

๐Ÿ“ Oliver Kreylos' Research and Development Homepage - Augmented Reality Sandbox via Mariano Guerra

๐Ÿงต conversation

Augmented Reality Sandbox

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

๐ŸŽฅ WUW / sixthsense - a wearable gestural interface via Mariano Guerra

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

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

๐Ÿ“ Bret Victor on climate change via Kartik Agaram

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

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

Music

๐Ÿ“ Orbita โ€“ a new device from Playtronica via Tak Tran

๐Ÿงต conversation

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

Turn color and gesture into music with Orbita - a new device in Playtronicaโ€™s range of quirky sound gadgets

๐ŸŽฅ Virtual Meetup 7 โ€ข November 27, 2024 via Ivan Reese

๐Ÿงต conversation

Youtube Thumbnail

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

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


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