Future of Coding Weekly 2020/03 Week 1

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!

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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)

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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Will Crichton shared Dreams | Release Date Trailer | PS4

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

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Scott Anderson shared Developing Embodied Familiarity with Hyperphysical Phenomena

Interesting set of VR interaction prototypes

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

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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