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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/07 Week 4
2025-07-28 00:27
🎙️ FoC 77 • As We May Think by Vannevar Bush 📄 Boxer: A Teacher's Experience 🎛️ Frame of preference
Share Your Work
🗨️ Ivan Reese: 🎙️ F----- o- C----- • Episode 77 • As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
[I've had this episode finished and ready to publish for like 2 months now, ugh! Sorry it's so late. Yeah, this was recorded back in, like, April(?) when we were deep in the "rename the community" discussion. Sigh.]
We're trying to switch it up a bit between "classics" like this month's paper, more recent work (like the prior, and the next episode — already recorded and releasing soon dammit — a preprint, so fresh), and maybe some weirder things. If there's stuff you think we should read that's relatively short (ideally less than 20 pages), well-written, and arguably relevant (the more "arguably" the better I say!) then I'd love to know about it.
No, I'm not going to talk about the content of the episode. Everyone knows it, surely. Surely! Sur… fine.
As We May Think was written in the 1940s and, worried about the surge of information complexity in the modern world, imagines how advancements to present technology would allow for the creation of a special machine, dubbed the "memex", that bears a striking resemblance to the Personal Computer of the 80s and later. This paper is often referenced as a good starting point for folks beginning their journey into deeply understanding and reimagining the computer. It's historically significant, it suggests a bit of alt-history, and (rule of 3s) it does other stuff too!
🗨️ TodePond: 🎥 You can do collab strudel with flok.cc it's a lot of fun
hello i gave a talk about a new live programming language called strudel
🎥 You can do collab strudel with flok.cc it's a lot of fun
🗨️ Laura Brekelmans:
I started a Discord for people who're interested in communal computing/dynamicland specifically for people in the Netherlands (and Belgium, I suppose!)
If you happen to be from the lower lands, let me know
Thinking Together
🗨️ guitarvydas:
Inspiration from today's demo meetup: Nilesh Trivedi casually tossed out the idea that there are 2 kinds of edges between software units: edge (visible line) and containment (invisible(?), but, easy to calculate using bounding boxes). I think that containment is important, but, I've been avoiding it because I could only think of complicated ways to represent it. If it's "just" an edge, then the problem is solved 🤦. I've used Prolog (exhaustive search using backtracking) in the past to infer edge information from JSON (SWIPL even knows how to inhale and exhale JSON). Now that backtracking is no longer a verbotten technique (OhmJS, Prolog, miniKanren, Nils Holm's Scheme code & transpilations of that code to other PLs, cl-holm, etc.) it should be straight-forward to create DPLs that use "containment" visual syntax. Hmmm...
Linking Together
🗨️ maf: 🎥 The Most ADVANCED VR Game in the WORLD! [Resonite]
Resonite (a.k.a. Future of VR, whitepaper, video) has an interesting built-in scripting engine. Probably the most immersive programming environment I've seen. I'll have to dust off my VR headset to try this one out!
🎥 The Most ADVANCED VR Game in the WORLD! [Resonite]
![The Most ADVANCED VR Game in the WORLD! [Resonite]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eLoVnZZWwEM/hqdefault.jpg)
🗨️ curious_reader: 📝 Rick Rubin | The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding
My quick search hasn't revealed anything so I just wanted to share this here again which a friend mentioned to me today:
📝 Rick Rubin | The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding
Rick Rubin brings ancient wisdom to the modern age in The Way of Code, a meditation on the art and science of vibe coding. With Claude by Anthropic, the Grammy-award winning producer and author of The Creative Act turns philosophy into practice with artifacts that can be creatively modified with AI.
🗨️ Jeffrey Tao:
A while ago I remember I came across a blog post or spreadsheet contrasting a large number of known non-textual programming languages. One attribute of each project was the modality: node-wire, scratch-like puzzle piece, etc. Does anyone know what I'm talking about or have a link? It is not The Whole Code Catalog or any of the linked surveys, nor is it the "Future of Coding or Programming: Project Comparison" spreadsheet.
🗨️ Kartik Agaram: 📄 Boxer: A Teacher's Experience [pdf]
Lovely and heartfelt.
🗨️ misha: Tacit Talk Episode 1: Uiua with Kai Schmidt
tacit (no local names), stack-oriented (forth), prefix-notated (lisp), APL https://www.uiua.org/
with a very good intro and "IDE" demo: Tacit Talk Episode 1: Uiua with Kai Schmidt
🗨️ Florian Schulz: 🎛️ Frame of preference
Omg you can use all those old Mac OS versions here:
https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/
A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.
AI
🗨️ Jason Morris:
That's an interesting way of framing AI usage. I'm not sure I like "authentic." I think there is a sort of expertise or craftsmanship or fluency that grows over time, but I don't know that it's ever inauthentic. I also think authenticity doesn't really explore whether you are upgrading existing systems, designing new systems for current tasks, or making new kinds of work possible. I think AI has unrecognized potential in that last category.
Present Company
🗨️ Ivan Reese: work on Automerge
Job posting — Ink & Switch is looking for someone to work on Automerge. It's something like a TypeScript + DevRel role, so if that sounds like you and you want to come work with a small group of playful researchers & engineers (and me), we'd love to have you!
👨🏽💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra
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