Feeling of Computing Weekly (Posts about past)

Future of Coding Weekly 2020/03 Week 1

Mariano Guerra — Thu, 02 May 2024 06:42:37 GMT

Welcome! Starting this week I will expand the "Demos" section to include original content created by Future of Coding members.

The "From our Community" section will have content shared by members but that comes from "outside".

But first things first, there's a new podcast episode, great topic and impressive production, check it out:

Future of Coding • Episode 45: Orca, with Devine Lu Linvega

Orca is typically encountered as an inky black and seafoam green alphabet soup, pulsating to some species of broody electronic industrial throb. But it is also a forgiving learning environment that doesn’t crash, puts code and data together in the same space, lets you directly manipulate code and data interchangeably, allows generous recovery from mistakes, and supports discovery through freeform play.

This is one of those "a very special episode" sort of things where.. it's going to be a bit different from the episodes I make for the forseeable future. Hope you enjoy it!

Demos & Community Original Content

Geoffrey Litt shared an update on his website customization with spreadsheets project: More examples of customizing Hacker News with a spreadsheet

show estimated read times (fetched from an API)

sort longest reads first, prioritize deeper content

add personal annotations

All in 1 minute, just using formulas. So many possibilities!

Sol Bekic has been working on/with a new interaction model for livecoding for a while, and just put together the first comprehensive summary of the approach: alivecoding: livecoding with persistent expressions ( Slack Thread)

Mariano Guerra shared a short demo of a UI feature: All the Small UX Things: repeat column names in the footer to shorten drop distance to cells below

The example shows how to reorder columns and configures an aggregation of attendance by home team when the away team is "Arsenal"

From our Community

Shalabh Chaturvedi shared https://ballerina.io/: A Programming Language for Network Distributed Applications (Slack Thread)

Whenever possible, Ballerina prioritizes programmer convenience & productivity with familiarity, clearer abstractions, and easier concepts over uber system performance.

In Ballerina, every program is a sequence diagram that illustrates distributed and concurrent interactions automatically. The diagram is the code. The code is the diagram.

Karki shared Debug Visualizer: A VS Code extension for visualizing data structures while debugging.

Rafael Luque shared "Some old thoughts about the need for a new way of thinking about software." via Shalabh Chaturvedi

The reality is that a usual software project stack involves an increasingly larger number of programming languages, DSLs, frameworks, systems, tools, techniques and processes, so it is a fact that the accidental complexity in our day-to-day software projects is increasing to unbearable levels.

We plan to build a new breed of dynamic and fully conceptual modeling environment in order to enable programmers to work through every development stage --analysis, specification, design, implementation, deployment, evolution, etc.-- at the conceptual level and explore their dynamic models as a thinking and learning tool.

Shalabh Chaturvedi shared The Physics of Software

"This work is about a possible theory of forces in software, and how it can inform the way we design, the way we talk about design, and the way we think about design."

Some interesting philosophizing - discussion about software as a material and the true nature of software.

Will Crichton shared Dreams | Release Date Trailer | PS4

Seems interesting to view as a commercial end-user programming system.

Scott Anderson shared Developing Embodied Familiarity with Hyperphysical Phenomena

Interesting set of VR interaction prototypes

Scott Anderson shared Example-based procedural placement in a dialogue system

Charlie Roberts shared Visualizing quaternions quaternions: An explorable video series

The “explorable” videos in this quaternion explanation are nicely done with an interesting reactive ui

Future of Coding Weekly 2020/02 Week 4

Mariano Guerra — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:08:35 GMT

On the experiment side, this week I started playing with emojis to allow quick scans for content of interest, I will try to be consistent with the emoji usage so people can use them to orient around a previously dry wall of text (the tool I use doesn't excel at promoting creative expression)

Demos

New little demo of end user software customization by Geoffrey Litt

Sort Hacker News by total points descending, for a more stable ranking
Remove the articles I've already read

Chet Chorcos shared a full-stack prototype of collaborate web application backed by a Datalog-inspired database he built in one day.

Useful resources mentioned in the How does it work? section of the readme.

A brief walk-through on the steps needed to create launch visualizations from the SpaceX HTTP JSON API (cameo of the basket to ease drag and drop of multiple things in targets far apart from the source). Also short demos about Premier League Attendance and Goals by Team from CSV File and Sales KPIs from an Excel Spreadsheet by Mariano Guerra

From our Community

Beyond Snapping: Persistent, Tweakable Alignment and Distribution with StickyLines

UIST 2016: Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology

Aligning and distributing graphical objects is a common, but cumbersome task. In a preliminary study (six graphic designers, six non-designers), we identified three key problems with current tools: lack of persistence, unpredictability of results, and inability to 'tweak' the layout.

We created StickyLines, a tool that treats guidelines as first-class objects: Users can create precise, predictable and persistent interactive alignment and distribution relationships, and 'tweaked' positions can be maintained for subsequent interactions.

Beyond Grids: Interactive Graphical Substrates to Structure Digital Layout

CHI'17: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Session: Spatial & Temporal Design

Traditional graphic design tools emphasize the grid for structuring layout. Interviews with professional graphic designers revealed that they use surprisingly sophisticated structures that go beyond the grid, which we call graphical substrates.

We present a framework to describe how designers establish graphical substrates based on properties extracted from concepts, content and context, and use them to compose layouts in both space and time.

Project Lincoln: Adobe MAX 2017 (Sneak Peeks)

Lincoln is a data visualization tool for designers to link graphics to data without the need to code.

Data Illustrator: Create infographics and data visualizations without programming

Augmenting Vector Design Tools with Lazy Data Binding for Expressive Visualization Authoring.

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018

Charticulator: Create Bespoke Chart Designs without Programming. ( Video)

Jennifer Mary Jacobs - Domain Specific Programming Platforms for Creativity

Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems by @bystroushaak who expresses his frustration in using raw text (files, command parameters, environment variables, socket...) as unique way to communicate at the OS level.

A list of future of programming projects maintained by Daniel García Carmona.

A twitter thread by @gravislizard argues that keyboard based old text UI was faster and not necessary less intuitive than web UI with mouse: > almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 amber-screen library computer in 1998: type in two words and hit F3. search results appear instantly. now: type in two words, wait for an AJAX popup. get a throbber for five seconds. oops you pressed a key, your results are erased.

Follows a Slack thread which eventually discusses distributed, interactive, stateful apps/systems.

Stamper: An Artboard-Oriented Creative Coding Environment by Cameron Burgess ( Slack Thread, Twitter Thread)

Stamper is an alternative editor for p5.js, inspired by design software with Artboards (e.g. Sketch, Illustrator)

Future of Coding Weekly 2020/02 Week 3

Mariano Guerra — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:07:20 GMT

Announcing the awesome program for the Convivial Computing Salon 2020 - ‹Programming› 2020

Demos

Raathi Kugarajan shared his project JSBubbles: Re-imagining reading and navigating JavaScript codebases in VSCode

I was tinkering with a VSCode extension inspired by Code Bubbles but my effort was mostly focused on navigating and reading JavaScript code bases.

Andrew Reece posted a second DevLog for WhiteBox, a live debugger/REPL for C(++) - now with a GUI, a familiar debugger-like data tree, graphing variable value changes across a function.

WhiteBox DevLog 2 - GUI, data trees and graphing values over time

Bloques Web Update by Mariano Guerra

An update to the tool to teach HTML/CSS/JS to non programmers, added new high level blocks, some even for layout, two lower level layers that get closer and closer to textual HTML. Also added import/export.

From our Community

Talk presenting Geometric Algebra for Computer Graphics which seems to simplify operations compared to other representations.

More information on the website https://bivector.net/

Clifford's Geometric Algebra enables a unified, intuitive and fresh perspective on vector spaces, giving elements of arbitrary dimensionality a natural home.

Implementations in Javascript, c++, c#, rust and python at the ganja.js project.

Jason Laster shared Web Replay which supports Time Travel Debugging

Web Replay records your entire application, so you can track bugs down faster, understand your code better, and always get perfect bug reports.

Greg Law on Debugging, Record & Replay of Data, and Hyper-Observability by Greg Law via Karki

Topics discussed included: the challenges with debugging modern software systems, the need for “hyper-observability” and the benefit of being able to record and replay exact application execution; and the challenges with implementing the capture of nondeterministic system data in Undo’s LiveRecorder product for JVM-based languages that are Just-In-Time (JIT) compiled.

All Programming Languages are Wrong by David A. Moon (Slack Thread)

Most current-day programming languages seem to be based on the idea that computation is slow, so the user and the compiler must work hard to minimize the number of instructions executed.

Compromises to minimize instructions extend so far as to make familiar-looking operators like + and < behave in unintuitive ways. If as a result a program does not work correctly in some cases, it is considered to be the programmer's fault. But it is really the language designer's fault.

Ryan Florence on twitter:

Whenever I talk to teenagers about programming they want to do it on their phone.

And an interesting Slack conversation about it.

Graydon Hoare on "text is already a highly-structured graphical notation" via yoshiki

many technical innovations are latent in textual notations. Visually unambiguous yet uniform symbol sets, combinatorial-positional word formation, linear spatio-temporal segregation, punctuation and structured page layout .. these are all technologies in writing that we had to laboriously invent, and they have purposes, advantages! Similarly in coding, we had to invent and adapt technologies from verbal and mathematical notations refined over millennia: lines and columns, indentation, block layout, juxtaposition and precedence, scope, evaluation order, comments, grammars, version control, diff and merge algorithms ... the pile of structuring technologies embedded in the textual representation of programs isn't free, and it isn't useless

So I'm just really cautious when people suggest throwing it all out for some hypothetical reinvention. You need those structures: so you've got an immediate problem of "what are you going to use instead", and a longer-term question of "what makes you think you're not going to wind up right back at the same place ten thousand years of refining graphemes-on-a-page wound up"?

There's more where those quotes came from: Re: Graphical Editors

Chris Knott shares an interesting story about evolving clocks to solve a particular problem in a Slack conversation. A similar story about the MacCready Gossamer Albatross is shared there too.

Some quotes:

importance of not confusing incidental problems for fundamental problems

the entire issue is not solved, but sidestepped

Future of Coding Weekly 2020/02 Week 2

Mariano Guerra — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:06:12 GMT

New Future of Coding Podcast #44 - Making Your Own Tools: Devine Lu Linvega | Future of Coding by Ivan Reese

Devine Lu Linvega and his partner Rekka live on a sailboat. He makes art, music, software, and other cultural artifacts. When Photoshop’s DRM required that he maintain a connection to the internet, he wrote his own creative suite. When his MacBook died in the middle of the ocean, he switched to Linux with hardware he could service. His electricity comes from solar panels, and every joule counts — so that’s out with Chrome and Electron and in with Scheme, C, assembly, and maybe someday Forth.

Demos

Customizing Airbnb with a spreadsheet by Geoffrey Litt

At 3:10 in this demo video, I drag select multiple listings on a website, and bulk perform an action on them.

From our Community

Anders Hejlsberg on Modern Compiler Construction. By Anders Hejlsberg via Daniel

In this video Anders a great foundation of compiler construction by describing the traditional methodologies that have been used in the last 30 or so years. He then uses that foundation to describe modern tooling needs and how compilers have adapted to meet increasing demands.

An interesting Twitter thread on the preservation of digital art, including comment on how it hurts that digital artists can't fully manage the media they use. (Long and interesting Slack Thread). By Matt Popke via Konrad Hinsen

Programs are a prison: Rethinking the fundamental building blocks of computing interfaces. By djrobstep (Slack Thread via Shalabh Chaturvedi)

We often hear that Apple's ecosystem of apps (or Microsoft's, or Google's) are "walled gardens". But what about the individual applications themselves?

Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. Boot splash screen? no problem. Custom Interface for your Home Automation Project? sure thing. Stream media processing? Of course. AWB "Desktop" concept ~5min video. By Bjorn Stahl via S.M Mukarram Nainar.

Interesting conversation on Slack about the positive benefits of accidental / incidental complexity.

This week on Slack, a fun prompt from Brandon Hudgeons (via Kartik Agaram):

You get to name an assertion the ___ Paradox (fill in your last name). What do you choose?

Come join Slack and start a new thread about your paradox!

Roam Research is looking for a Full Stack Engineer (Leaning Backend) by Conor White-Sullivan

Should love Clojure, be comfortable with some devops type work, and ideally have experience with Datomic and datalog.

Big points if you're familiar with the work of Doug Engelbart, Bret Victor, Michael Nielsen, Andy Matuschak, and Alan Kay.

SF preferred, but we'll consider remote.

Operon 0.5.0 is out, find it from https://operon.io (Java-binary and pdf-booklet) by OperonGuy (Slack Thread)

It is also the first public release and I'm hoping for feedback on the most rudimentary things; did you get the queries running (if you had a chance to try)? What was your initial impression on the language? Did you encounter anything illogical or that you could consider as possible design flaw?

I have not yet documented everything, so there's more to come on later releases. Also none of the components were yet released, so it is just the core that is out now. Love to hear back from you!

Summary of a paper: Paper; Didn't Read - Statecharts: A Visual Formalism For Complex Systems by instadeq

statecharts = state-diagrams + orthogonality + depth + broadcast-communication

Thomas Ballinger wrote some posts about "Observable for Jupyter Users".

A lively discussion in the Slack Thread

I'd be particularly interested in whether you think I'm identifying the differences in workflow in a digestible way. The goal is that these are tutorials, not marketing documents, if there's a difference. I guess they're marketing documents for programmers, not CEOs.

An article about Glamorous Toolkit describing what one rendering tree means and the doors it opens for creating new kinds of 2D interfaces: One rendering tree. Via Tudor Girba (Slack Thread)

Future of Coding Weekly 2020/02 Week 1

Mariano Guerra — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:02:47 GMT

Psychology of Programming Interest Group Call for Papers

The 31st Annual Meeting of the Psychology of Programming Interest Group will be hosted for the first time in North America, at OCAD University's Inclusive Design Research Centre in Toronto, Canada, during the week of July 29-31, 2020.

From our Community

Catalog of Visual Math Tools (Slack Thread)

Mike Travers joins our slack and introduces himself and his work. He worked at MIT MediaLab long time ago on Behave! an interesting block based visual language for simple agent programming, that was one of the ancestor of Scratch. He now works on visual programming based on Blockly to help scientist build queries to scientific data (see this presentation).

GopherCon Europe 2019: Ivan Daniluk - Rethinking Visual Programming Presentation. (Slack Thread) via Edward de Jong

Blog post: Rethinking Visual Programming with Go

Play: A new approach for creating better mobile apps via Achraf Kassioui (Slack Thread)

Play empowers you to design, build and launch better mobile products, in less time, with fewer barriers - all on your mobile device.

Mariano Guerra shared a video showing an educational prototype to produce HTML pages using Blockly to learn what HTML structure looks like without having to worry about syntax at first. The prototype is online (in Spanish) and its sources are on GitHub.

Jonathan Blow talking about his past, of course about games, but also about programming today, open source, C++, Rust, the future of programming, and many other issues people here will be interested in (and/or annoyed by his perspective ;-): On the Metal Podcast: Jonathan Blow (Slack Thread) via Stefan Lesser

Algojammer is an experimental, proof-of-concept code editor for writing algorithms in Python. (Slack Thread) via Shalabh Chaturvedi

Internship Opportunities: Designing for spreadsheets and programming languages at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. via Daniel Garcia

Future of Coding Weekly 2020/01 Week 4

Mariano Guerra — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:42:27 GMT

Welcome! this week I'm trying a different format for entries, let me know if you notice and what you think about it :)

Demos

Instadeq No Code Data Science Update: Time Traveling Undo

New feature to undo changes by seeing the different states of an entity through time and picking one to restore.

From our Community

Steve Dekorte started a really interesting conversation about different ways of representing nothingness, and how that sometimes chaffs against type discipline. The conversation goes deep on data modelling and representation.

What's wrong with computational notebooks? by Austin Z. Henley (Slack Thread)

Computational notebooks, such as Jupyter Notebooks, Azure Notebooks, and Databricks, are wildly popular with data scientists. But as these notebooks are used for more and more complex tasks, data scientists run into more and more pain points. In this post I will very briefly summarize our method, findings, and some opportunities for tools.

This post is an informal summary of our recent CHI'20 paper, "What's Wrong with Computational Notebooks? Pain Points, Needs, and Design Opportunities". Check out the preprint for more details.

Fabrik - A Visual Programming Environment by Dan Ingalls and others (Slack Thread and Twitter Thread)

Fabrik is a visual programming environment - a kit of computational and user-interface components that can be "wired" together to build new components and useful applications. Fabrik diagrams utilize bidirectional dataflow connections as a shorthand for multiple paths of flow. Built on object-oriented foundations, Fabrik components can compute arbitrary objects as outputs. Music and animation can be programmed in this way and the user interface can even be extended by generating graphical structures that depend on other data. An interactive type system guards against meaningless connections. As with simple dataflow, each Fabrik component can be compiled into an object with access methods corresponding to each of the possible paths of data propagation.

Principles of Effective Research by Michael Nielsen has some good tips on conducting research. (Slack Thread)

A video by Philip Guo PG Vlog #___ - Nielsen's "Principles of Effective Research": what i find most relevant for students

Will the future of coding be statically, dynamically typed, both or neither? Alexis King thinks that No, dynamic type systems are not inherently more open. (Slack Thread)

Hillel Wayne has A Totally Polished and not-at-all half-baked Take on Static vs Dynamic Typing

Vladimir Gordeev shared a presentation he gave at his university: Towards efficient development tools (Slack Thread)

In presentation I tried to show the possibility and need for better tools. I did a short overview of existing FoC projects, talked a bit about project I am working on: a generic tree editor (structure editor) that doesn't tied up to any PL. I also talked about idea of designing PL by balancing Order and Chaos, ideas that I got from Jordan Peterson.

I believe that breakaway from text-based editing towards structure-based is an inevitable event for future of programming.

I also have some other ideas about programming languages that I would like to build on top of this tree editing platform, but it is not covered in presentation.

Branislav Selic - On the Engineering of Software-Based Systems for the 21 st Century (Slack Thread)

Learning from failed utopias of the recent past: Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

The web we have today is slowly becoming a glorified app store, just the easiest way among many to download software that communicates with distant servers using closed protocols and schemas, making it functionally identical to the software ecosystem that existed before the web. How did we get here? If the effort to build a Semantic Web had succeeded, would the web have looked different today? Or have there been so many forces working against a decentralized web for so long that the Semantic Web was always going to be stillborn?

How Figma’s multiplayer technology works

Our primary goal when designing our multiplayer system was for it to be no more complex than necessary to get the job done. A simpler system is easier to reason about which then makes it easier to implement, debug, test, and maintain. Since Figma isn't a text editor, we didn't need the power of OTs and could get away with something less complicated.

Figma's tech is instead inspired by something called CRDTs, which stands for Conflict-free Replicated Data Types. CRDTs refer to a collection of different data structures commonly used in distributed systems. All CRDTs satisfy certain mathematical properties which guarantee eventual consistency. If no more updates are made, eventually everyone accessing the data structure will see the same thing.

GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery, curated videos, books, screenshots, articles, etc. that explore the history and evolution of the graphical user interface.

a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them.

Past Futures of Coding

Self: The Movie; an overview of the self programming language from 1995.

Another self presentation: Self and Self: Whys and Wherefores

(September 30, 2009) David Unger, from IBM Research, discusses how his experience in computer science has led him to the conclusion that even if your ideas succeed, the real legacy is the people.

Future of Coding Weekly 2020/01 Week 3

Mariano Guerra — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 09:12:29 GMT

Welcome! we are slightly over 150 members, let's try the 200 goal for next month :)

This time I introduced some simple separators between entries so it's clear where something ends and the next thing starts, let me know what you think.

Demos

Edward de Jong posted a new example showing the physical units of measurement feature in the Beads language, which tracks units at runtime (by storing the exponents of the component physical unit terms along with the value). A few languages have included physical units, but it is extremely rare to track the units at runtime.

For the heat transfer app, see https://github.com/magicmouse/beads-examples, for the SDK go to beadslang.com, for more information check beadslang.org (which is different from the previous one)

(Slack Conversation)

Mariano Guerra shared a demo: No Code Data Science Update: Drag & Drop Basket, Workspaces and Search (Slack Conversation)

Easier drag & drop of one or more items across long distances or across screens with the basket.

Workspaces can be created to work on different tasks and search used to navigate between them.

From our Community

Kartik Agaram Shared a really detailed spreadsheet: Future of Coding or Programming: Project Comparison

westoncb author of Lucidity introduced himself and presented another project: a slightly better known structure editor project called Tiled Text. (Slack Conversation)

nagle wrote a blog-post version of a paper submitted to PPIG (Psychology of Programming 2019) How Coda helps people overcome technology freeze

(Slack Conversation)

I'm sketching out a way to connect recent nervous system breakthroughs to programmable UI design, taking inspiration from how cognitive science breakthroughs anchored original UI design for the Alto.

Paper: Winter is Coding: On Programming & The Freeze Response

Michael Dubakov shared The 'No Code' Delusion (Slack Conversation)

Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this, and I think some of the “no code” tools are great. But I also thing it’s wrong at heart.

Mariano Guerra shared Compiling Dark to SQL

How do we make programs in Dark fast, while keeping complexity for developers really low?

We recently shipped a new Dark feature that compiles Dark code to SQL. This post goes into the nitty gritty details of how and why we built it.

Stefan Lesser shared Visual Calculations in the Shape Machine

What does it mean to have a new modeling software for design that allows scientists, engineers and designers to specify their actions by drawing shapes rather than by writing scripts? What is the difference between a shape you see and the way it is currently recorded in the database of your computer? What does it mean to program with shapes?

Ivan Reese shared Bret Victor's list of references

Didn't realize that Bret had directory listings enabled on his server, but it makes sense given other "open for people to view and tinker" things he's done. (My favourite: all his javascript is unminified so you can see how he implemented the dynamic examples in his essays.)