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

Two Minute Week

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

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

🎥 Edit Dependancies

👋 Editor with Exporter via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

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

🎥 Tom Larkworthy's Video - Dec 7, 2024

Our Work

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

🧵 conversation

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

📝 ☞ Computation and Wonder, Soon in Book Form!

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

🕸️ Smallweb - Your internet folder via Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

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

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

📝 Smallweb - Your internet folder

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

Devlog Together

💡 December Adventure via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

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

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

💻 Markov Chain Monte Carlo via Tom Lieber

🧵 conversation

😌😌😌

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

🎥 tug-of-war mcmc and optimizations

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

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

💬 Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

🎥 What if visual programming interfaces had weather?

🦋 ezhik.me via Ezhik

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🎥 Screen Recording

Thinking Together

📝 UTF-8 in usernames via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

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

📝 Schnieder's algorithm via John Christensen

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

Content

📝 Research as leisure activity via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Research as leisure activity

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

🧑‍💻 Malleable Systems Collective via Duncan Cragg

🧵 conversation

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

📝 Malleable Systems Collective

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

📝 Welcome to the forum

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

📑 Roelof Knol | art portfolio via Greg Bylenok

🧵 conversation

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

🪴 beautifully provocative via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

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

Present Company

📝 FutureOfCoding starter pack for Mastodon/Fediverse via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

I put together FutureOfCoding starter pack for Mastodon/Fediverse.

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

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

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

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

✉️ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

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

Two Minute Week

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

🧵 conversation

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

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

Our Work

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

🧵 conversation

The videos from last month presentation are now available:

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

🎥 Mariano Guerra on LLMs

🎥 Tudor Girba on LLMs

🕸️ smallweb via Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

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



export default new Smallblog({

  siteTitle: "Pomdtr's Blog",

  defaultAuthors: ["pomdtr"],

});

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

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

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

📝 fishtower.conradgodfrey.com via Conrad Godfrey

🧵 conversation

Hi,

Sharing fish tower

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

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

fishtower.conradgodfrey.com

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

🧵 conversation

Hello Future of Coding folks!

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

github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

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

Devlog Together

💬 Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

"make illegal states unconnectable"

🎥 Screen Recording

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

🧵 conversation

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

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

this can be solved with more granual commits,

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

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

🛸 Eclector via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

The code for my demo available on Codeberg.

🎥 Demo

💻 exporter via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

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

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

💬 Jason Morris

🧵 conversation

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

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

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

Thinking Together

📝 github.com/bellard/quickjs via John Flockton

🧵 conversation

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

Content

🎥 ABI-DOS Announcement Trailer via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

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

EDIT: Ended up collecting a handful of these.

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

🧵 conversation

Pretty great thing I wish I had through life:

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

Usable on lex.page

📃 Feels Like Paper via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

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

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

🧵 conversation

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

🎥 Handmade Cities via misha

🧵 conversation

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

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

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

Augmented Reality Sandbox

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

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

🧵 conversation

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

📝 Bret Victor on climate change via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

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

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

Music

📝 Orbita – a new device from Playtronica via Tak Tran

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

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

✉️ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

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

Two Minute Week

💬 Taylor Troesh

🧵 conversation

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

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

🧵 conversation

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

Our Work

📡 public.me/anton via Anton Podviaznikov

🧵 conversation

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

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

here is my micro blog public.me/anton

📝 Research manifesto via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

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

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

🧵 conversation

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

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

🧵 conversation

Reverse Engineering a 218-Byte Wasm Compiler in JavaScript

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

Devlog Together

📝 the lab notebook entry via Tom Lieber

🧵 conversation

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

📝 Building Software Using Black Boxes via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

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

📝 my notebook app via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

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

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

🗒️ wtc

📊 A small update via Tom Lieber

🧵 conversation

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

📝 thinking ahead via Pietu

🧵 conversation

Hi again 👋.

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

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

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

🎥 Murkdown exec blocks

📝 draw.io via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

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

Thinking Together

💬 Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

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

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

📝 Bret Victor's PROCESS via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Bret Victor's PROCESS

💬 Alex McLean

🧵 conversation

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

Content

🦕 Reactive HTML notebooks via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Content editable Observable runtime based notebooks 🤔 Pretty cool!

🎥 MIT Theory of Computation, Fall 2020 via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

🔑 Foundation DB Query Language via Taylor Troesh

🧵 conversation

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

📺 Democratizing Software - Handmade Seattle 2024 via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

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

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

💬 Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

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

1. "rewriting"

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

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

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

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

(Details and repos available, if interested).

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

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

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

✉️ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

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

Two Minute Week

💬 Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

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

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

🧵 conversation

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

Our Work

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

🧵 conversation

My first ever proper academic publication!!!!

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

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

Also it's a stage play

Devlog Together

🎥 Edited via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

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

💬 Jason Morris

🧵 conversation

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

💬 Pietu

🧵 conversation

Hi again 👋.

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

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

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

🎥 Murkdown composable blocks

📝 Programming Language Workbench - Beginnings via Paul Tarvydas

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

💬 Tom Lieber

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

💬 Tom Lieber

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A few debug passes, and it renders schematic tables!

Thinking Together

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

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

💬 Sam Gentle

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

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

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

Content

🤖 AI Makes Tech Debt More Expensive via Steve Dekorte

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

AI increases the penalty for low quality code

🎥 A New Kind of Spatial Computer via Taylor Troesh

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spatialpixel.com

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

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Lots of nuggets of wisdom in this book about live coding

📝 Live Coding: A User's Manual

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

Present Company

📝 Modo End of life extended license via Ivan Reese

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Work

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

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I wrote: It takes a collective to raise an idea

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

Devlog Together

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

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

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

🎲 probabilistic programming language project via Tom Lieber

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

alltom.com/pages/spawelo

Cool problem ✅

Cool model ✅

Cool algorithms ✅

💬 Pietu

🧵 conversation

Hi all 👋.

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

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

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

🎥 Murkdown example blocks

⏰ for hopefully the final time via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

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

• without daylight savings time
• with daylight savings time

The way I'm naively imagining using this:

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

• Scroll or find the timezone you care about.

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

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

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

🎙️ Hest — The Podcast via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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Simple REPL for a DPL including a file watcher.

Towards Higher Level Syntax for Programming Languages

Thinking Together

📝 The Future of Programming via Paul Tarvydas

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

💬 Guyren Howe

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I am quite interested in Event Handlers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Managing Programming Complexity

Content

📝 One way to do applied research via Patrick Dubroy

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

One way to do applied research

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

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🟧 automat.org @ HN via Maikel van de Lisdonk

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

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

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adding onto my post over at bsky:

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

📝 Gregor (@watwa.re)

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

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

💬 Maikel van de Lisdonk

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

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

🧵 conversation

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

🦋 Future of Coding - Community via Gregor

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

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

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🎥 Operational Version Control 🔮 The Future of Coding 💡 Subsequently

Our Work

🎥 spreadsheet / paint-program hybrid via Kevin Greer

🧵 conversation

I created this spreadsheet / paint-program hybrid. That may sound weird, but it actually makes sense when you see how it works (I think). Here are two videos showing it's basic features and 2D and 3D turtle graphics support

💬 Kevin Greer

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I'm working on a server/website so that people can publish and share their creations. Feedback and suggestions appreciated.

🎥 Dialogues on natural code via Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

hello again it's me.

i gave a talk last week on why i am a machine 🤖

🐦 Guyren Howe (@unclouded) on X via Guyren Howe

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🐦 Guyren Howe (@unclouded) on X: LLMs are a distillation of everything ever written.

We are a distillation of all the successful responses to the experiences that drove our ancestors’ evolution.

I think the distillations methods are kinda similar. But are not experiences. This is how we differ.

Devlog Together

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

A couple of days ago I noticed a bug that's been in all my apps since I started programming with LÖVE at the start of 2022. Start searching for text, type nothing into the pattern to search for, then find again repeatedly. Crash. Caused by misusing a Unicode library, even though this bug needs no special chars to trigger.

Now I've pulled the bugfix into 54 forks 😮‍💨

🎥 Quinebook via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

I've built a single file notebook export format in Observable userspace. Convert an Observable notebook into a single file. Self-replicating notebooks. You don't even need a local webserver to run them, they work in a file:// context. You can put them on a webserver if you want. This is complement the userspace notebook source💬 #devlog-together@2024-10-20. I still have some more work on this to consider it fully working (e.g. FileAttachment support), but today I finally reached the milestone that the exporter can export an operational version of itself.

Thinking Together

🔮🎥 The future of coding via Jonathan Edwards

🧵 conversation

My talk on the future of coding

Content

💡🎥 Subsequently at LIVE via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Marcel Goethals presenting Subsequently at LIVE

Operational Version Control by Jonathan Edwards via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Graphics

💬 Patrick Dubroy

🧵 conversation

Hello! I'm curious if anyone here has a good idea about interleaving works between a compute shader and a fragment shader.

Some relevant details:

• My app is built with Rust and wgpu, and I'm running on an M1 Macbook Pro.
• I have a single encoder with a compute pipeline and a render pipeline.
• The compute shader writes to a storage buffer defined like this:

@group(0) @binding(2) var<storage, read_write> output: array<vec4<f32>>;

• The fragment shader reads from the same buffer. Basically, each fragment is just one element of the vec4<f32> . The fragment shader is very simple, and doesn't touch anything else in the storage buffer.

I've added timestamp queries to the pipeline, and what I'm seeing is this:

Duration #1: 47.800208ms

Duration #2: 47.809876ms

Frame time: 51.2545ms

Duration #1 is computed from the compute shader timestamps (the duration between the beginning and end of the compute pass) and Duration #2 is the time for the render pass, computed the same way.

Frame time is measured on the CPU.

I expected the duration of the compute shader and fragment shader to add up to the frame time (approximately). But it doesn't and I'm confused about why! Could it be due to interleaving of the compute pass and render pass? If so, I'm curious how the synchronization works. How does the GPU figure out the dependencies between the write (a compute shader invocation) and the reader (fragment shader invocation)?

I don't have any explicit synchronization, but I'm also not seeing any tearing or anything that would indicate that there is a data race between the shaders.

Music

🎥 Ravescript - Make Music With Code! - Ep. #7 via Alex McLean

🧵 conversation

Present Company

🎥 Virtual Meetup 6 • October 30, 2024 via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's the recording of the Future of Coding virtual meetup 6. We had a demo of Automat.org from @Marek Rogalski, a demo of Inkling from myself, and a demo of Kendra.io's dashboard builder from @Daniel Harris. Good stuff all around! See you next month.

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

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🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast