Future of Coding Weekly 2024/09 Week 1

🎙️ FoC 73 • Moving Beyond Syntax 📢 Onward! and LIVE Papers Announced 🧦 Hypercard in the World

Two Minute Week

💬 Karl Svartholm

🧵 conversation

Trying to make Duplo more interesting... So far it is working (probably), seem to have encouraged my daughter to learn to stack two pieces together! 😃

Actually the next step after a fanfare is probably (not the stars but) to have pieces make different sounds and/or beats depending on sensors (ex sensing colors, stacking, proximity or sound) — a music machine. Perhaps more important: a programmer base plate; where you stack pieces & program them (from ex Arduino studio, for now). Inter-piece communication could also be interesting? Ideas?

🎥 Video 1

🎥 Video 2

Our Work

🎙️ Future of Coding 73 • Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Finally, a title with appropriate length given the duration and depth of its episode. May it swiftly be surpassed.

Alexander Repenning created AgentSheets, an environment to help kids develop computational thinking skills. It wrapped an unusual computational model with an even more unusual user interface. The result was divisive. It inspired so many other projects, whilst being rejected at every turn and failing to catch on the way Scratch later did. So in 2017, Repenning published this obit of a paper, Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets, which covers his findings over the years as AgentSheets evolved and transformed, and gives perspective on block-based programming, programming-by-example, agents / rule / rewrite systems, automata, and more.

This is probably the most “normal” episode we’ve done in a while — we stay close to the text and un-clam many a thought-tickling pearl. I’m saying that sincerely now to throw you off our scent the next time we get totally lost in the weeds. I hear a clock ticking.

🤔 Bloquecitos: the ultimate visual programming language via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

Inspired by the podcast episode above I created bloquecitos: the ultimate visual programming language

Try it here: marianoguerra.github.io/experiments/bloquecitos

🎥 Bloquecitos Demo

Devlog Together

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Leveling up goals: a shower thought

• Life: "cells maintain the environment in which RNA molecules originated." (tim-taylor.com/assets/docs/barricelli-suggestions-for-starting-theoretic-papers-6-6-1987.pdf; page 2)
• Bureaucracy: you create a system that can outlive you. The system outlives its own usefulness.
• Permaculture: design systems to try to make themselves less and less necessary to the functioning of the ecosystem. (merveilles.town/@neauoire/113040776489493243)

Reading Together

📝 BDI Agents: From Theory to Practice via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

LLMs are forcing me to think about non-deterministic yet rational "computation".

Agents are beyond what traditionally computation has been. When an agent starts performing a task, and the environment changes, they need to find the balance between too much rethinking (classical decision theory) and not enough rethinking (computation).

Thinking Together

💬 Guyren Howe

🧵 conversation

I just had a thought.

Is anyone aware of any work on a non-programmer-friendly UI for editing pattern matching? Semantically, I’m looking for Datalog. So I guess a Datalog query UI, although I could imagine a pattern matching UI being developed outside of a use with Datalog.

💬 Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

I’m trying to figure out why you (Ivan Reese) think that using OhmJS to produce the wiki would create a dependency, while I (Paul Tarvydas) don’t think so. Here’s a diagram of how I understand the situation...

💬 Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

I've been thinking about how neurosymbolic AI might be achieved. The first problem is that of memory/knowledge. Triple stores are often recommended. But I am failing to see how triples are THE definitive choice for knowledge representation.

The classic example would be: How to store the fact "Bob's age is 23yrs". This maps to the Entity-Attribute-Value or Subject-Predicate-Object pattern and the triple (Bob, age, 23yrs) works.

But on one hand, even a 2-store can be used:

(Bob, Bob's age)

(Bob's age, 23yrs)

This has more layers of indirections, yes. But the primitives become simpler.

On the other hand, if the fact was "Bob bought this camera in Singapore for 100$", the same layers of indirections show up in triple stores as well.

Arbitrary knowledge seems multidimensional (time, place, context etc etc). Is there a reason to believe that triple stores achieve the best tradeoff between simplicity and expressivity?

📝 0048: zest progress, zest ordering, wasm alignment, umbra papers, future of fast code, new internet, books, other stuff via Jamie Brandon

🧵 conversation

Does anyone have thoughts about equality vs ordering in maps/sets?

I have some pondering here - scattered-thoughts.net/log/0048/#zest-ordering but the decision tree at the end is the main thing:

• Order isn't observable at all.
• Iteration order is either non-deterministic or expensive.
• Determism can be manually recovered by storing both a map and a list of keys, but at the cost of storing two copies of each key.
• Order is observable.

• Order doesn't affect equality.

• Equality is not extensional ie a == b does not imply that f(a) == f(b) .

• If [a: 0, b: 1] == [b: 1, a: 0] then we must have struct[a: i64, b: i64] == struct[b: i64, a: i64] , but we still have to remember that the field order is different, which implies that type equality can't rely on interning and pointer comparison.

• Order affects equality.

• Sets become surprising / less useful.

• If I want to add query planning, I can't promise that f(db) == optimize-query(f)(db) .

Content

💡 SPLASH 2024 - Onward! Essays - SPLASH 2024 via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

The accepted contributions to Onward! Essays and Onward! papers have been announced. Many of the titles/abstracts sound very relevant for our community. And three essays have authors from FoC.

🎥 Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part One, 1982) via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People, 1982

• Part One * youtube.com/watch?v=si9iqF5uTFk&t=1s

• 20:58 - We’ve Always Done It This Way *

• 47:10 - Systems Of Computers, Not Bigger Computers *

• 48:00 - Get Out Of The Plane Of Paper *

• Part Two * youtube.com/watch?v=AW7ZHpKuqZg

• 0:00 - Security *

• 8:42 - Bloatware *

• 9:57 - 2FA *

• 12:12 - Specialized Machines Are Faster Than General Purpose Machines *

• 12:59 -We Have To Overcome The Concept Of Only One Computer *

• 14:58 - Dependency Analysis *

• 18:53 - Use independent modules *

• 22:15 - Advocate the use of standard high level languages *

• 27:19 - Buying Computer Time *

• 34:49 - Management vs. Leadership *

my thoughts on the above issues

🧦🎥 Hypercard in the World, May 2016 via Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

Just in case you missed it

🎥 Subtext 1 via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I had no idea Jonathan Edwards's landmark Subtext is almost 20 years old.

Subtext 1 (2005) is still hugely compelling. I hadn't watched this until today. If you're like me, you're in for a treat.

This work predates Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" by 7 years!

📑 Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE) via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

The accepted list of papers for liveprog can be seen here liveprog.org and I notice that FoC is very well represented by quite some folks from this community, very nice! 😎

🤖

💬 Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

The holy grail of AI. Any thoughts on how this kind of integration can be achieved?

Present Company

🔠 Departure Mono via Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

DEPARTURE MONO IS A MONOSPACED PIXEL FONT WITH A LO-FI TECHNICAL VIBE

🎥 Virtual Meetup 4 • August 28, 2024 via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's the recording of the Future of Coding Virtual Meetup 4. We saw a textual projectional editor from @Jarno Montonen, an Observable-based exploration of visualizations from Tom Larkworthy, and I shared an update on the FoC Wiki.

Next month, rather than demos, we're going to host a little event where we all get together on a call and write wiki articles. Should be fun, likely chaotic. See you there!

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

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