✉️ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter
Future of Coding Weekly 2023/02 Week 4
2023-02-26 22:42
💡 Is Software Spatial? 🤖 UX of AI Programming Assistants 🛸 Self-conscious Reflexive Interpreters 💻 Live Game & Functional Programming
Devlog Together
Been making good steady progress on my new editor. I now have my wasm extensions automatically interrupt. So I can have a long running computation (or even an infinite loop) happening in an extension, on the same thread and not miss any frame times. Having that really sets the ground work for the live programming model I want for these "extensions".
After some clean up I'm starting to do some dog fooding for another project I'm working on, generating an arm64 assembler from the xml specification of instructions. The plan is to write the coding utilizing my editor as the visualization environment to get fast feedback on if I have the instructions correct. Still a long way to go, but the fundamentals are taking shape.
Our Work
💬 Eli Mellen
How’d folks feel about threading the URLs to their personal sites? I’d love to follow more folks over RSS.
Reading Together
💡📄 Software is an abstract artifact via Jimmy Miller
Perhaps you too are wondering if software is inherently spatial. A great paper on this topic is “Software is an Abstract Artifact” by Nurbay Irmak. I might not agree with everything written, but it is a very readable paper and a great introduction to the topic.
Software is a ubiquitous artifact, yet not much has been done to understand its ontological nature. There are a few accounts offered so far about the nature of software. I argue that none of those accounts give a plausible picture of the nature of software. I draw attention to the striking similarities between software and musical works. These similarities motivate to look more closely on the discussions regarding the nature of the musical works. With the lessons drawn from the ontology of musical works I offer a novel account of the nature of software. In this account, software is an abstract artifact. I elaborate the conditions under which software comes into existence; how it persists; how and on which entities its existence depends.
Thinking Together
💬 Ibro
I’m curious “where” people think of visual in visual programming being. For context, I spend a lot of time in tools like Houdini, Solidworks, Cavalry, and After Effects. Some of them have more access to computation than others, but the biggest difference between those and Processing or threejs is a large “standard library” of functions.
On the other hand, building a website with live feedback or scripting in a REPL seem like a very different experience from just writing the same code in notepad. I wonder if visual programming is all just “debug views” rather than the specific presence of a GUI. And if so, what does that mean for generalized visual languages or environments?
I am not sure but this might be a thing - in order to reduce scrolling through files I try to keep each function in respective separate file (so I have over hundred of files so far) and I wrote a simple code that copies the content of the function into the body of the html page and adds some template text like <script> tags etc.
I try to find the most minimal set of tools in the motto of bicycle for mind - in other words - you don’t need a complex solution like an aircraft carrier but rather a bicycle.
💬 Eli Mellen
Does anyone have future of code flavored papers by folks who aren’t white dudes?
I’ve been pulling together a reading list for an engineering reading group at work, and would like to make sure it’s at least a 50/50 split.
📝 VMF-Text: Powerful Grammar-based Language Modeling Framework via Jarno Montonen
I'm in need of two solutions:
- Generating a language model out of ANTLR grammar. Preferably in C#.
- Printing an AST to text according to an ANTLR grammar.
I found this github.com/miho/VMF-Text, but anything else?
💬 Jarno Montonen
Another thing I'd be interested is solutions for bidirectional text transformations (for source code). Ideally a system in which you could define transformations once, and get both AtoB and BtoA transformers
Content
📝 C-rusted: The Advantages of Rust, in C, without the Disadvantages via Shubhadeep Roychowdhury
🤖📝 Papers on the UX of AI programming assistants via Mariano Guerra
Papers on the UX of AI programming assistants
This is a list of research papers investigating the user experience of AI-powered programming assistants (e.g., Copilot)
📝 VRL Studio: Innovative, intuitive and powerful Visual IDE for rapid prototyping, learning, teaching and experimentation via Jarno Montonen
Another cool and dead project from the past I just run into
🛸📄 A Unified Approach to Solving Seven Programming Problems (Functional Pearl) via Kartik Agaram
This minikanren paper is excellent: "A Unified Approach to Solving Seven Programming Problems (Functional Pearl)"
Found via William Byrd's recent talk about ongoing work: 🛸 FOSDEM 2023 - Self-conscious Reflexive Interpreters
💻🐦 Tweet from @allan_blomquist via Christopher Shank
A cool demo for live/immediate programming with a game engine and some cool debugging explorations!
🐦 Allan Blomquist: Here's a look at some of our internal programming tools at Tomorrow Corporation!
💻📝 Hazel, a live functional programming environment featuring typed holes. via Nilesh Trivedi
🎙 #87 Jack Rusher by defn via Jack Rusher
In case anyone likes this sort of thing, I just did an episode of the defn (mostly clojure, but generally programming too) podcast
Present Company
📝 Designing multiplayer apps with patterns from architecture via Matt Webb
Hi folks — any fans of A Pattern Language here? Or (like me) any wannabe fans? I dip into it, and it has been invaluable in designing multiplayer apps with nuanced social interaction. Here’s one of my blog posts.
However! It’s long and I’ve never read the whole thing… So a few of us on Masto decided to start a reading group. One pattern a week, we’ll finish neatly at the end of the book’s 50th anniversary year (2027)
We’re meeting on discord at 5pm uk time on mondays (so noon east coast us, 9am west coast). Starting this coming Monday. Join us here: Join the Talking Patterns Discord Server!
Apologies if this is out of place but I figured there was a good chance it would be of interest to at least some people here!
📇 People of Future of Coding via Mariano Guerra
An index of users that contributed to the newsletter and provided a link to use when mentioned