Future of Coding Weekly 2020/01 Week 4

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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

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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?

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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.

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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.