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Future of Coding Weekly 2024/06 Week 4
2024-06-23 23:27
ποΈ Future of Coding 72 β’ Pygmalion π₯ The Alternate Reality Kit π We Need a Super Cockpit for the Mind
Two Minute Week
π₯ Explaining effects with EYG via Peter Saxton
Trying to explain effects better with EYG
βΊοΈ new Macro Recorder object was added this week via Marek Rogalski
A new object was added to Automat over the last week - it's the final one that is needed for the MVP to work. And it does work! I've recorded myself writing a small C++ program and the macro recorder replayed it correctly ^^
I guess I'll start posting Automat updates to Mastodon :) Here is the first one - a new Macro Recorder object was added this week!
Our Work
π Future of Coding 71-VISION β’ This is not a fish via Lu Wilson
Here it is... the Future of Coding's first official video adaptation.
This is This is not a fish
ποΈ Future of Coding 72 β’ Pygmalion by David C. Smith via Ivan Reese
If you're anything like me (oof, sorry), you've heard of Pygmalion but never caught more than the gist. Some sort of project from the early 70s, similar to Sketchpad or Smalltalk or something, yet another promising prototype from the early history of our field that failed to take the world by storm. Our stock-in-trade on this show.
But you've probably heard of Programming by Demonstration. And you've certainly heard of icons β you know, those little pictures that have become indelibly part of computing as we know it. Pygmalion is the originator of these conceptsβ¦ and more!
The best introduction to Pygmalion is Mariano Guerra's No-code History: Pygmalion, which includes a clearly articulated summary of the big ideas, motivation, and design, with a video demonstration of the programming interface, key terminology, and links.
The most introduction to Pygmalion β or Pig Million, The Millionth Pig, as it'll surely come to be known β is the subject of today's episode: the original paper by David Canfield Smith.
π’ Make Your Self via Mariano Guerra
Make Your Self: In Search for Maxwell's equations of OOP
My attempt at growing the smallest object oriented language step by step, let me know what you think!
π Just Some Innocent Gradient Fun - Untested via RafaΕ Pastuszak
Some Innocent Gradient Fun (explaining how to apply shading via noise + posterise in SVG)
Hi there! This one will be quick. Let's let the code speak for itself for a change. innocent-gradient-fun.webp A week back or so I saw a video by a channel called Texture Labs explaining a simple shaβ¦
Devlog Together
π¬ Oleksandr Kryvonos
π₯ Flying chars
Reading Together
π₯ The Alternate Reality Kit via Marek Rogalski
I've just learned about Alternate Reality Kit. I've searched through the archive and it was mentioned in passing a couple of times but I don't think this article was ever posted: Experiences With The Alternate Reality Kit An Example of the Tension Between Literalism and Magic . There is also a relatively recent video upload (video comes from 87 but it was uploaded only three years ago) which shows a more mature version in action: The Alternate Reality Kit .
Its similarity to the system that I'm developing is just uncanny! I'm very interested in learning more about it. I tried to follow its history to figure out why it was abandoned but I've only been able to track that its development eventually led to the Self language (Self and Self: Whys and Wherefores) which honestly seems like a step back from the original. I have my theories about why it might have been abandoned (which is that educational software is hard to sell) but would love to learn more about it from the people who might know more. Or maybe there are other systems that might have been derived from it?
π₯ Self and Self: Whys and Wherefores
π¬ Konrad Hinsen
I don't know, but I have my hypothesis as well as for why this and other user-empowering approaches were abandoned: the rise of PCs. In the late 80s and early 90s, the first PCs appeared and were seen as the obvious road to computing for everyone. But they were not powerful enough to run environments like Smalltalk. It's Basic we got instead. In parallel, professional high-end computing grew as well and that's where the money was. Academia followed the money.
Thinking Together
π¬ Oleksandr Kryvonos
Builders manifesto (aka* Software builders manifesto )
Build as much as you can, experiment as much as you can, build something you are passionate about.
*- I just created this manifesto, so it is a bit of overstretch on the βakaβ part π
Content
π Achieving Self-Sustainability in Interactive Graphical Programming Systems via Shalabh Chaturvedi
@Joel Jakubovicβs thesis should be interesting to folks here.
Achieving Self-Sustainability in Interactive Graphical Programming Systems Programming is fraught with accidental complexity. Software, including tools used for programming, is inflexible and hard to adapt to one's specific problem context. Programming tools do not support Notational Freedom, so programmers must waste cognitive effort expressing ideas in suboptimal notations. They must also work around problems caused by a reliance on plain text representations instead of Explicit Structure.
The idea of a Self-Sustainable programming system, open to adaptation by its users, promises a way out of these accidental complexities. However, the principles underlying such a property are poorly documented, as are methods for practically achieving it in harmony with Notational Freedom and Explicit Structure. We trace the causes of this difficulty and use them to inform our construction of a prototype self-sustainable system. By carefully reflecting on the steps involved in our specific case, we provide insight into how self-sustainability can be achieved in general, and thus how a motivated programmer can escape the aforementioned sources of accidental complexity.
Future of Coding also gets a shout-out:
I must express my gratitude to the Future of Coding Slack channel for making me aware of Tomasβ PhD opportunity in late 2018
π We Need a Super Cockpit for the Mind (History Talk) By Tom Furness via Justin Janes
π epic mastodon thread via Ivan Reese
This epic mastodon thread has some interesting reflections on Pygmalion.
π Christopher Alexander & Center for Environmental Structure Archive via Stefan Lesser
For those of you interested in Christopher Alexanderβs work: The Christopher Alexander & Center for Environmental Structure Archive is live. Here's an excerpt from Maggie Moore Alexander's announcement:
This new website gives access to 50+ years of work by Alexander and colleagues at CES. The goal of this continuing endeavor is to share the work with all who wish to build and repair living environments in which people thrive. In total, the Archive includes some 29,000 items. About 50% of them have been catalogued to date and are listed on the website. Around 6000 items have been digitized and are now available from the website as downloads. As funding allows, we will work toward making the whole collection available.
π€
π₯ Autocomplete for infinite canvas - Lu Wilson - tldraw - AI Demo Days #1 via Nilesh Trivedi
Lu Wilsonβs AI demo for TLDraw: youtube.com/watch?v=01yE-vzJ-NE
Present Company
π¬ Ezhik
have you ever done a project where you added an embedded programming language for scripting, configuration, fun, etc? what's your go-to choice for the language? why?
π¨π½βπ» By π @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io π¦ @warianoguerra
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