Future of Coding

Inventing on Principle Stop Drawing Dead Fish The Future of Programming Yes, all three of them in one episode. Phew! Links $ patreon.com/futureofcoding — Lu and Jimmy recorded an episode about Hest without telling me, and by total coincidence released it on my birthday. Those jerks… make me so happy. Cellpond: Spatial Programming Without EscapeWatInventing on Principle by Bret Victor ("""Clean""" Audio)BraidThe WitnessDavid HellmanBraidA Lesson Is Learned but the Damage Is IrreversibleDynamiclandLight TableChris GrangerLearnable ProgrammingThe LinesneakheetParis Fashion WeekCanadian TuxedoLichessHot Module ReplacementPygmalionCuttleApparatusToby SchachmanForrest OliphantToby's episodeRecursive DrawingScreens in Screens in ScreensLarry TeslerNo IdeasblogwikibloggardenRich HickeySimple Made EasyJacob CollierSuffragettesright to voteincelBLTCStop Writing Dead ProgramsJack RusherJack RusherJack RusherIt's the fish one, the one with the fish. …Sorry, these aren't actually fish, or something, because they're just drawings.René MagritteLa Trahison des ImagesMargit the Fell OmenWords and ImagesEnglish translationAcousmatic MusicsandsCellPondBarnaby Dixon? Barnaby Dixon. Barnaby Dixon! Barnaby Dixon!!"""Metronome"""early versionTorn Leaf Zero videothisWintergatan — Marble MachineArroostArroost tutorialthings people have made with ArroostRain Roompretty coolhow rain works in many video gamesRAIN WORLDbeautiful demo of a microtonal guitarmicrotonal guitar with mechanized frets that can change the tuning dynamicallya lovely blog postblank.pageSuper Meat BoyCelesteNewgroundseBaum's WorldHomestar RunnerT2 Tile ProjectRobust-First ComputingIvan SutherlandSketchpadPlannerPlayStation 3 Cell processorSpaceMouse Put all metal back into the ground. Music featured in this episode: This Score is Butt UglyThe Sailor's Chorus ! Send us email, share your ideas in the Slack, and catch us at these normal places: MastodonWebsiteMastodonWebsiteMastodonWebsite See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/71 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dave Ackley's paper Beyond Efficiency is three pages long. With just these three pages, he mounts a compelling argument against the conventional way we engineer software. Instead of inflexibly insisting upon correctness, maybe allow a lil slop? Instead of chasing peak performance with cache and clever tricks, maybe measure many times before you cut. So in this episode, we're putting every CEO in the guillotine… (oh, that stands for "correctness and efficiency only", don't put us on a list)… and considering when, where, and how to do the robust thing. Links $ patreon.com/futureofcoding — The most recent bonus episode is a discussion with Stefan Lesser about new "laws of physics" we can invent inside the computer. Don't destroy the earth, then make sure your thing can't be destroyed, then don't destroy your data, and finally, do your damn job, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. A Software EpiphanyHN discussionPartyKitsimple todo listocean of tech boy milkAI apocalypseJepsenKyle KingsburyreversinghexingtypingrewritingunifyingRAIDCAP theoremAutomergethe engineering of FoundationDBByzantine fault toleranceCan programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?John BackusWe Don't Really Know How to Compute!Gerald SussmanRobust-First Computing Creedvon Neumann architectureAlex WarthDemon Hoard SortBogosortDreamberdThe WitnessJonathan BlowAphantasiaBraidDatamoshlovely galleryAbstractionReverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 VaccineFiverrPCPFight ClubDust BrothersRandy NewmanIndefinite Scalability for Living Computation"It is difficult"Upton Sinclair Music featured in this episode: Hawker Newsuser: spiralganglionCorporate WorldDust Brothers No more jokes! Find us at these normal places: MastodonWebsiteMastodonWebsiteMastodonWebsiteMastodonWebsite Send us email, share your ideas in our Slack, and support the show on Patreon. Yes, do all three please. http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/70 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the spirit of clearly communicating what you're signing up for, this podcast episode is nearly three hours long, and among other things it contains a discussion of a paper by author Mary Shaw titled Myths & Mythconceptions which takes as an organizing principle a collection of myths that are widely believed by programmers, largely unacknowledged, which shape our views on the nature of programming as an activity and the needs of programmers as people and the sort of work that we do as a sort of work, and where by acknowledging these myths the three of us (Mary Shaw primarily, and by extension Jimmy and I, those three people, that's it, no other people appear on this podcast) are able to more vividly grip the image of programming with our mind's eye (or somesuch) and conceive of a different formulation for programming, and in addition to these myths this paper also incudes a number of excellent lists that I take great pleasure in reading, beyond which I should also note that the paper does a job of explaining itself and that hopefully you'll find I've done a similar job, that's the spirit, please enjoy. Links $ patreon.com/futureofcoding — I've recently changed it so that there's only 1 instance of the INTERCAL tier available, so if you're interested in those perks you'd better hop on it quick before nobody else does! videoClaude ShannonTop 10 Hits of the End of the WorldBandcampSpotifyApple MusicVal TownSteve KrouseInk & SwitchProgrammer BumsComputer BumsLimmy's WaRetoolMythBustersThe Flop HouseFinal Judgements: Good-Bad, Bad-Bad, Kinda-LikeCRDTDataRobust-First ComputingDave AckleyThe T2 Tile ProjectDevineAn approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permacultureMUMPSmumpsEpicEpicGlass CannonCellpond: Spatial Programming without EscapeTuring tarpitFunctional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed WireRichard D. JamesRichard P. (Peter) GabrielNeil ArmstrongErlangThe WitnessJack RusherJack RusherJack RusherTrainJamGary BernhardtIdeology Nobody remarked on these silly links last time, so this time I'm drawing more attention to them: NeopetsMySpaceAngelfireOrkutGeocitiesFriendster https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/069 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The subject of this episode's paper — Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler — is one of those grand ideas that makes you want to go stargazing. To stare out into space and just disassociate from your body and become one with the heavens. Everything — life, space, time, existence — all of it is a joke! A cosmic ribbing delivered by the laws of the universe or some higher power or, perhaps, higher order. Humanity waited two thousand years, from the time of the ancient Greeks through until the 1930s, for a means to answer questions of calculability, when three suddenly arrived all at once: General recursive functionsLambda calculusTuring machines Then it was discovered that these three models of computation were, in fact, perfectly equivalent. That any statement made in one could be made in the others. A striking coincidence, sure, but not without precedent. But then it was quietly determined (in 1934, again in 1969, and finally published in 1980) that computation itself is in a direct correspondence with logic. That every proposition in a given logic corresponds with a type in a given programming language, every proof corresponds with a program, and the simplification of the proof corresponds with the evaluation of the program. The implications boggle the mind. How could this be so? Well, how could it be any other way? Why did it take so long to discover? What other discoveries like this are perched on the precipice of revelation? Philip Wadler is here to walk us through this bit of history, suggest answers to some of these questions, and point us in a direction to search for more. And we are here, dear listener, to level with you that a lot of this stuff is miserably hard to approach, presented with the symbols and language of formal logic that is so often inscrutable to outsiders. By walking you through Wadler's paper (and the much more approachable Strange Loop talk), and tying it in with the cultural context of modern functional programming, we hope you'll gain an appreciation for this remarkable, divine pun that sits beneath all of computation. Links => patreon.com/futureofcoding — but only if you back the Visual Programming tier!! I'm warning you! Propositions as TypesCocoonInsideLimboHollow KnightSilksongChris MartensGödel, Escher, BachInfinity and the MindTo Mock a MockingBirdhierarchy of automataGames: Agency as ArtThe Incredible Proof MachineStop Doing MathDon't Do MathBidirectional Type CheckingDavid ChristiansenList Out of LambdaSteve Losh Nobody noticed that these links were silly last time, so this time I'm drawing more attention to it: MastodonEmailMastodonTwitter This link is legit: FoC Slack https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/068 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Go To Statement Considered Harmful is a solid classic entry in the X Considered Harmful metafiction genre, authored by renowned computer scientist and idiosyncratic grump, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra. Surprisingly (given the impact it's had) this is a minuscule speck of a paper, lasting only 1-ish pages, and it even digresses several times from the main point. Fear not! Jimmy and I spend the entirety of these two podcast hours thoroughly analyzing the paper, wringing every last drop of insight from it, speaking directly to how programming ought to be reimagined from the molten venture capital core on up. Yes indeed, this is another episode in the fine tradition of Future of Coding where we stay faithfully close to the text, we leave the second-order implications alone, and there's nothing more than that. Nothing portended, nothing changed. Links => patreon.com/futureofcoding Hest"All Cretans are liars"The Humble ProgrammerThe Emperor's Old ClothesLetter O Considered Harmful“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered HarmfulJames while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacherChomskyInterlisp"I Want to Half-Believe" episode of Very Bad WizardsThe WitnessDelimited ContinuationsNotation as a Tool of ThoughtThe Zen of PythonChunky BaconCopilotCharles BabbageBridgewater TreatisesPrincipia MathematicaThe Sailor's ChorusPEP 8There are dozens of us considered harmful.TC39BifunctorsChocolateRadiolabUBIForkingThe Semantics of Graphical Languages Music featured in this episode: Get in touch, ask questions, don't ask questions: MastodonEmailMastodonTwitterFoC SlackPatreon https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/067 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This community is a big tent. We welcome folks from all backgrounds, and all levels of experience with computers. Heck, on our last episode, we celebrated an article written by someone who is, rounding down, a lawyer! A constant question I ponder is: what's the best way to introduce someone to the world of FoC? If someone is a workaday programmer, or a non-programmer, what can we share with them to help them understand our area of interest? A personal favourite is the New Media Reader, but it's long and dense. An obvious crowd-pleaser is Inventing on Principle. Bonnie Nardi's A Small Matter of Programming deserves a place on the list, especially if the reader is already an avid programmer who doesn't yet understand the point of end-user programming. They might ask, "Why should typical computer users bother learning to program?" Well, that's the wrong question! Instead, we should start broader. Why do we use computers? What do we use them to do? What happens when they don't do what we want? Who controls what they do? Will this ever change? What change do we want? Nardi challenges us to explore these questions, and gives the reader a gentle but definitive push in a positive direction. Next time, we're… considered harmful? #### $ We have launched a Patreon! => patreon.com/futureofcoding If, with the warmth in your heart and the wind in your wallet, you so choose to support this show then please know that we are tremendously grateful. Producing this show takes a minor mountain of effort, and while the countless throngs of adoring fair-weather fans will surely arrive eventually, the small kilo-cadre of diehard listeners we've accrued so far makes each new episode a true joy to share. Through thick and thin (mostly thin since the sponsorship landscape turned barren) we're going to keep doing our darnedest to make something thought-provoking with an independent spirit. If that tickles you pink, throw some wood in our fireplace! (Yes, Ivan is writing this, how can you tell?) Also, it doesn't hurt that the 2nd bonus episode — "Inherently Spatial" — is one of the best episodes of the show yet. It defrags so hard; you'll love it. #### Init Frog FractionsThe WitnessGetting Over It with Bennett FoddyOnly UpThe Looker gets the point.Getting Over It is a triumphOctodadQWOPI Am BreadBraidCookie ClickerUniversal Paperclipsincremental gamesJump KingOnly UpFlappy BirdSurgeon SimulatorGoat SimulatorStanley ParableBaby StepsbadThe Talos PrincipalSwapperAntichamberQUBEsay somethingmechanics (or dynamics)Silent FootballMao #### Main Partially Examined LifeCommunications, Computers and NetworksLarry TeslerAlan Kayinteresting to reflect onKnowledge Navigator1995speculative fiction marketingconversational agentsRewind.aiLifestreamsS-GPTFederico ViticciChatGPTShortcuts"If-Tuh-Tuh-Tuh"ZapierLUTArri AlexaRedCode With JasonC Is Not a Low-level LanguageWhat Follows from Empirical Software Research?video about redstonehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9rEQAGpLwViva La VidaKnuth's up-arrow notation One meaning of "end-user programming" is about allowing people to build their own software. Another is about modifying existing software, and here are two interesting links related to this second meaning: sprout.place is a lovely website where you decorate a little virtual space together with some remote friends. It's like a MySpace page mashed-up with a Zoom hang, but better. Geoffrey Litt is a researcher who has tackled both meanings of EUP, but his work on the second meaning is especially interesting. For instance: he worked on Riffle, which explored the consequences of putting the full state of an app inside a reactive database, which is especially interesting if you consider what can be done if this database is available to, rather than hidden from, the end user. To the best of our recollection, Jonathan Edwards has advocated for "end-programmer programming" as a helpful step toward end-user programming. Get in touch, ask us questions, please...

The execution of code, by its very nature, creates the conditions of a "strong legalism" in which you must unquestioningly obey laws produced without your say, invisibly, with no chance for appeal. This is a wild idea; today's essay is packed with them. In drawing parallels between law and computing, it gives us a new skepticism about software and the effect it has on the world. It's also full of challenges and benchmarks and ideas for ways that code can be reimagined. The conclusion of the essay is flush with inspiration, and the references are stellar. So while it might not look it at first, this is one of the most powerful works of FoC we've read: Interpreting the Rule(s) of Code: Performance, Performativity, and Production by Laurence Diver, 2001. Next episode, we're having an open-ended discussion about end-user programming. The reading is Bonnie Nardi's 1993 classic, A Small Matter of Programming, with the referenced articles from the 1991 Scientific American special issue Communications, Computers and Networks as extra background. Links NovaPanicend-of-lifeThe Gapunicorn-puke GUIArcLight TableiA Presentervideo teaserMimestreamone of theseSparrowthis video that keeps getting interruptedAtom 1.0 announcement videoVery Bad WizardsIf Books Could KillSpeech actElephant 2000DynamiclandOn The Expressive Power of Programming LanguagesSapir-Whorf hypothesisBlackHollow KnightDoom Eternalthe inventive soundtrackLocal-first softwareAndorBrazil Get in touch, ask us questions, DON'T send us the sound of your knuckles cracking: MastodonEmailMastodonTwitterFuture of Coding Slack https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/065 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a normal episode of a podcast called Future of Coding. We talk about INTERCAL, a real tool for computer programming. [Do I need to say more? Will this sell it? Most people won’t have heard of INTERCAL, but I think the fake out “normal” is enough to draw their attention. Also, I find “computer programming” funny. Not sure why I put that in quotes.] Links [at least, the ones I remembered to jot down] The final Strange Loop is coming up this September. Ivan and Jimmy will both be there, though—late breaking news—neither of them will be giving a talk. (“Rocket Rules” apply, if you know what that is.) [Will anyone actually know what “Rocket Rules” is? Will they search for it? That would be sort of embarrassing for me.] If Ivan were to give a programming talk, getting some flood-contaminated gear from DEC or a PDP-11 to use as staging / set dressing might be a challenge. [Yay, another retread of my personal history. Maybe instead of dredging up my past I should be the sort of person who makes new things, like, ever.] Meowmeowbeenz [Gah this show hasn’t aged well. At least I’m sticking to the whole “high-brow + low-brow” personal identity by including the reference to it. [Is “meta” low-brow at this point?]] There’s lots of talk about esolangs (esoteric programming languages), so it’s worth linking the Esolang Wiki. [I worry that we spent too much time focusing on surface syntax. Jimmy tried to get us to talk about the beautifully-weird semantics within INTERCAL, but we never fully went there. I’m sure some people will complain about this lack of depth. Not looking forward to that.] In particular, Brainfuck, which Jimmy adorably refers to as “BF” because he’s a polite gentleman and Ivan is 2% South Park. [Laughing at my own joke.] Also, Shakespeare and Shakespeare: vaulting ambition, Out, damned spot, both from the Scottish play (you don’t know where I am, don’t @ me). [Why are these in the show notes? Am I trying to signal some sort of theatre-literacy? Who cares?] “COMEFROM was eventually implemented in the C-INTERCAL variant of the esoteric programming language INTERCAL” [Considering that this was such a non-element in the original paper, it’s weird that it became such a cornerstone of the episode. “What if we recreated the spirit of the paper in the podcast itself” is a tall order, so I guess we did what we could with what we had. Also, I bet someone is going to object that the paper and language aren’t actually very meta, especially not multiple layers deep, to which I’ll reply: we all bring the flavour of our mouth to the soup we taste.] Exapunks… Yeah! [Speaking of things that haven’t aged well… woof. I like our newer episodes better. Especially this one. THAT’S JUST BAIT FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WILL COMPLAIN THAT THIS SHOW HAS GONE OFF THE RAILS, PLEASE DO CONTINUE TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW.] Our tier list was created in tldraw, because it’s the best. [I wish someone applied Steve-and-co’s eye for detail to a visual programming tool. I wish I had time.] The excellent Advent of Computing podcast did an episode on INTERCAL. (Aside: the AoC website seems a bit busted in non-Chrome browsers, so here’s a backup YouTube link, but you can also just search for Advent of Computing in your podcast player of choice.) [AoC is the exception that proves the rule: there are no high-quality programming podcasts. They all seem so low-effort, made by people who don’t respect the listener’s time and attention. Or they’re aping the high-budget NPR style, with no personality. Also, audio quality is all over the map. Also, just the worst garbage ads and theme music, all of them! I wonder if it’s just a cost-benefit time/energy tradeoff, or maybe people don’t know how to do better? I wonder what we could do to help raise the bar, without opening ourselves up to a bunch of “well I don’t like your podcast either” presumed competitiveness.] The video Screens in Screens in Screens is fantastic, and the sort of thing that deserves our...

Out of the Tar Pit is in the grand pantheon of great papers, beloved the world over, with just so much influence. The resurgence of Functional Programming over the past decade owes its very existence to the Tar Pit’s snarling takedown of mutable state, championed by Hickey & The Cloj-Co. Many a budding computational philosophizer — both of yours truly counted among them — have been led onward to the late great Bro86 by this paper’s borrow of his essence and accident. But is the paper actually good? Like, really — is it that good? Does it hold up to the blinding light of hindsight that 2023 offers? Is this episode actually an April Fools joke, or is it a serious episode that Ivan just delayed by a few weeks because of life circumstances and his own incoherent sense of humour? I can’t tell. Apologies in advance. Next time, we’re going back to our usual format to discuss Intercal. Links Before anything else, we need to link to Simple Made Easy. If you don’t know, now you know! It’s a talk by Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) that, as best as I can tell, widely popularized discussion of simplicity and complexity in programming, using Hickey’s own definitions that built upon the Tar Pit paper. Ignited by this talk, with flames fanned by a few others, as functional programming flared in popularity through the 2010s, the words “simple”, “easy”, “complex”, and “reason about” became absolutely raging memes. We also frequently reference Fred Brooks and his No Silver Bullet. Our previous episode has you covered. The two great languages of the early internet era: Perl & TcL For more on Ivan’s “BLTC paradise-engineering wombat chocolate”, see our episode on Augmenting Human Intellect, if you dare. For more on Jimmy’s “Satoshi”, see Satoshi Nakamoto, of course. And for Anonymous, go on. Enemy of the State — This film slaps. “Some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and state.” — Guy Steele “my tempo” FoC Challenge: Brooks claimed 4 evils lay at the heart of programming — Complexity, Conformity, Changeability, and Invisibility. Could you design a programming that had a different set of four evils at the heart of it? (Bonus: one of which could encompass the others and become the ur-evil) The paper introduces something called Functional Relational Programming, abbreviated FRP. Note well, and do not be confused, that there is a much more important and common term that also abbreviates to FRP: Family Resource Program. Slightly less common, but yet more important and relevant to our interests as computer scientists, is the Fluorescence Recovery Protein in cyanobacteria. Less abundant, but again more relevant, is Fantasy Role-Playing, a technology with which we’ve all surely developed a high degree of expertise. For fans of international standards, see ISO 639-3 — the Franco-Provençal language, represented by language code frp. As we approach the finality of this paragraph, I’ll crucially point out that “FRP”, when spoken aloud all at once at though it were a word, sounds quite like the word frp, which isn’t actually a word — you’ve fallen right into my trap. Least importantly of all, and also most obscurely, and with only minor interest or relevance to listeners of the podcast and readers of this paragraph, we have the Functional Reactive Programming paradigm originally coined by Conor Oberst and then coopted by rapscallions who waste time down by the pier playing marbles. FoC Challenge: Can you come up with a programming where informal reasoning doesn’t help? Where you are lost, you are without hope, and you need to get some kind of help other than reasoning to get through it? Linear BLinearBIntercalEsolangs a kind of testing It was not Epimenides who said “You can’t dip your little toesies into the same stream” two times — presumably because he only said it once. Zig has a nicely explicit approach...

Jimmy and I have each read this paper a handful of times, and each time our impressions have flip-flopped between "hate it so much" and "damn that's good". There really are two sides to this one. Two reads, both fair, both worth discussing: one of them within "the frame", and one of them outside "the frame". So given that larger-than-normal surface for discursive traversal, it's no surprise that this episode is, just, like, intimidatingly long. This one is so, so long, friends. See these withered muscles and pale skin? That's how much time I spent in Ableton Live this month. I just want to see my family. No matter how you feel about Brooks, our thorough deconstruction down to the nuts and bolts of this seminal classic will leave you holding a ziplock bag full of cool air and wondering to yourself, "Wait, this is philosophy? And this is the future we were promised? Well, I guess I'd better go program a computer now before it's too late and I never exist." For the next episode, we're reading a fish wearing a bathrobe. Sorry, it's late and I'm sick, and I have to write something, you know? Links: Fred Brooks also wrote the Mythical Man-Month, which we considered also discussing on this episode but thank goodness we didn't. Also, Fred Brooks passed away recently. We didn't mention it on the show, but it's worth remarking upon. RIP, and thanks for fighting the good fight, Fred. I still think you're wrong about spatial programming, but Jimmy agrees with you, so you can probably rest easy since between the two of us he's definitely the more in touch with the meaning of life. The Oxide and Friends podcast recorded an episode of predictions. Jimmy’s Aphantasia motivates some of his desire for FoC tools. Don’t miss the previous episode on Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building, since Ivan references it whilst digging his own grave. Jimmy uses Muse for his notes, so he can highlight important things in two colors — yes, two colors at the same time. Living in the future. For the Shadow of the Colossus link, here’s an incredible speedrun of the game. Skip to 10:20-ish for a great programming is like standing on the shoulders of a trembling giant moment. Mu is a project by Kartik Agaram, in which he strips computing down to the studs and rebuilds it with a more intentional design. “Running the code you want to run, and nothing else.” “Is it a good-bad movie, a bad-bad movie, or a movie you kinda liked?” Ivan did some research. Really wish Marco and Casey didn't let him. Jimmy did an attack action so as to be rid of Brook’s awful invisibility nonsense. Awful. As promised, here’s a link in the show notes to something something Brian Cantrill, Moore’s Law, Bryan Adams, something something. Dynamicland, baby! Here’s just one example of the racist, sexist results that current AI tools produce when you train them on the internet. Garbage in, garbage out — a real tar pit. AI tools aren’t for deciding what to say; at best, they’ll help with how to say it. Gray Crawford is one of the first people I saw posting ML prompts what feels like an eternity ago, back when the results all looked like blurry goop but like… blurry goop with potential. Not sure of a good link for Jimmy’s reference that Age of Empires II used expert systems for the AI, but here’s a video that talks about the AI in the game and even shows some Lisp code. Idris is a language that has a bit of an “automatic programming” feel. The visual programming that shall not be named. When people started putting massive numbers of transistors into a single chip (eg: CPU, RAM, etc) they called that process Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). Also, remember that scene in the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire when the hunky Steve Jobs-looking guy said "VLSI" to impress the girl from the only good episode of Black Mirror? I'm still cringing. Sally Haslanger is a modern day philosopher and feminist who works with accident and essence despite their problematic...

This is Jimmy’s favourite paper! Here’s a copy someone posted on HitBug. Is it as good as the original? Likely not! Ivan also enjoyed this Theory Building business immensely; don’t be fooled by the liberal use of the “blonk” censor-tone to cover the galleon-hold of swearwords he let slip, those mostly pertain to the Ryle. For the next episode, we’re reading No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks. Links The Witness, again! The Generation Ship Model of Software Development The philosophy of suckless.org Stop Writing Dead Programs, a talk by Jack Rusher, gets a whole new meaning! Someone rewrote Super Mario 64’s code to run faster and better on original N64 hardware. Music featured in this episode: Speed x Distance = TimeIn an Expression of the InexpressibleMelody of Certain Damaged Lemons Hey listener! Send us questions so we can answer them on the show. Like, “How do you turn your worms?” Or, “What’s so great about prepromorphisms anyway?” We’ll answer them, honest! Send them here: IvanJimmyFoC Slack futureofcoding.org/episodes/061 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before the time-travelling talks, the programmable rooms, the ladders and rocket launchers, we had the first real Bret Victor essay: Magic Ink. It set the stage for Bret's later explorations, breaking down the very idea of "software" into a few key pieces and interrogating them with his distinct focus, then clearly demoing a way we could all just do it better. All of Bret's works feel simultaneously like an anguished cry and a call to arms, and this essay is no exception. For the next episode, we're reading Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur, with a little bit of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind thrown in for good measure. Links Four Hundred of the most Chart-Topping Thoughts of All Time: Inventing On PrincipalStop Drawing Dead FishDrawing Dynamic VisualizationsDynamicland Paper Programs by JP Posma was inspired by Dynamicland. "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." from Halt and Catch Fire Charticulator is Microsoft Research's take on a _Drawing Dynamic Visualizations_-esq tool. Jimmy's Fender Jazz bass looks like this, but red, but like a decade older, but like $600 at the time. We could probably post parts of this episode as Boyfriend Roleplay on YouTube. Fitts's Law is but one thing we've learned about the industrial design aspect of building good software. The Witness is a game where communicating ideas through (essentially) graphic design is the whole entire point of the game. If you haven't played it, know that it comes highly recommended by plenty of folks in the community. A "red letter Bible" is a Bible in which the words spoken by Jesus are colored red, to make them easier to identify. Toph Tucker has a pretty cool personal website. It's rare to see these sorts of sites nowadays, and they're always made by adventuresome programmers, trendy design agencies, or their clients. In the Flash era, it felt like everyone had a website like this, for better and for worse. tldraw is a beautiful little browser-based drawing tool by Steve Ruiz. What few things it does, it does exceptionally well. John while Henry had had had had had had had had had been my preference. #devlog-together is the channel on our Future of Coding slack community where members post small, frequent updates about what they're working on. The (Not Boring) apps are arguably a counterpoint to Bret's theses about information apps and harmful interaction, where the interaction and graphic design are balanced against being maximally-informative, toward being silly and superfluous, to great effect. Did you know there's a hobby horse, but also a hobby horse? I didn't! There are a few examples of folks doing FoC work that, in Ivan's view, align well with the values Bret outlines in Magic Ink: Szymon KaliskiInk & SwitchProgrammable InkMock MechanicsFelipe ReigosaPANEJosh Horowitz Robot Odyssey was a 1984 game for the Apple II (and some other, lesser systems) in which players would go inside various robots to reprogram them. Music featured in this episode: unfinishedSneaky DancesShaun's Amaj Rebirth Hey! Send us questions we can answer on the show. Like, "How do you keep bread warm?" Or, "What's so great about concatenative languages?" We'll answer them. Send them here: JimmyIvanFoC Slack futureofcoding.org/episodes/060 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Following our previous episode on Richard P. Gabriel's Incommensurability paper, we're back for round two with an analysis of what we've dubbed the Worse is Better family of thought products: The Rise of Worse Is BetterWorse is Better is WorseIs Worse Really Better? Next episode, we've got a recent work by a real up-and-comer in the field. While you may not have heard of him yet, he's a promising young lad who's sure to become a household name. Magic Ink Links The JIT entitlement on iOS is a thing that exists now. Please, call me Nickieben — Mr. Bourbaki is my father. A pony is a small horse. Also, horses have one toe. Electron lets you build cross-platform apps using web technologies. The apps you build in it are, arguably, doing a bit of "worse is better" when compared to equivalent native apps. Bun is a new JS runner that competes somewhat with NodeJS and Deno, and is arguably an example of "worse is better". esbuild and swc are JS build tools, and are compared to the earlier Babel. The graphs showing the relative lack of churn in Clojure's source code came from Rich Hickey's A History of Clojure talk. To see those graphs, head over to the FoC website for the expanded version of these show notes. wormholes futureofcoding.org/episodes/059 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today we're discussing the so-called "incommensurability" paper: The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel. In the pre-show, Jimmy demands that Ivan come right out and explain himself, and so he does, to a certain extent at least. In the post-show, Jimmy draws such a thick line between programming and philosophy that it wouldn't even look out of place on Groucho Marx's face. Next episode, we will be covering the Worse is Better family of thought products, so take 15 minutes to read these three absolute bangers if you'd like to be ahead of the game: The Rise of Worse is BetterWorse is Better is WorseIs Worse Really Better? Links Phlogiston TheoryPhlogistonBright Eyes - First Day of My LifeConor OberstConal ElliottFranPeter Gabriel - Games Without FrontiersPilot: A Step Toward Man-Computer SymbiosisParadigms Without Progress: Kuhnian Reflections on Programming Practiceprogramming languages have some bits that are invented and some bits that are discoveredthe best 15 seconds in Strange Loop historyPeter Naur's Programming as Theory Building Sponsors CarrotGrid — They don't have a web presence (weird, hey?) but they're working on an interesting problem at the intersection of data, so listen to the short ad in the episode to find out more. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital — Instead of running our usual sponsors today, we'd like to direct your attention to this humanitarian cause. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and our friends (can we call them that?) at Relay.fm are running a pledge drive. If you have any spare coins in your couch cushions, or a few million left over from your last exit, you'd be hard pressed to find a more deserving way to invest them. Donate here. Show notes for this episode can be found at futureofcoding.org/episodes/58 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There once was a podcast episode. It was about a very special kind of book: the Dynabook. The podcast didn't know whether to be silly, or serious. Jimmy offered some thoughtful reflections, and Ivan stung him on the nose. Sponsored by Replit.com, who want to give you some reasons not to join Replit, and Theatre.js, who want to make beautiful tools for animating the web with you. futureofcoding.org/episodes/57 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Jimmy Miller joins the show as co-host. Together, we embark on a new series of episodes covering the most influential and interesting papers in the history of our field. Some of these papers led directly to where we are today, and their influence cannot be overstated. Others were overlooked or unloved in their day, and we revive them out of curiosity and wonder. A few even hint at an inspiring future we haven't yet achieved, placing them squarely in line with our community's goals. We give these papers all the respect and deep reflection they deserve and, perhaps, the occasional kick in the shins. Today's paper is titled Man-Computer Symbiosis, authored by J.C.R. "Licky" Licklider in 1960. The title sure is outdated — but how have the ideas aged in the eternity since it was published? Listen on to hear your two hosts figure that out, and delight at just how wildly right and wrong some of its predictions turned out to be. Thank you to the following sponsors, all of whom are doing important work in our field, and all of whom want to hire you to do even more of it: Theatre.jsGlideReplit (I keep hearing about more and more people in our sphere landing jobs at these co's — high-fives all around!) Show notes for this episode can be found at futureofcoding.org/episodes/55 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's guest is Ella Hoeppner, who first came onto the radar of our community back in the fall when she released a web-based visual Clojure editor called Vlojure, with a captivating introduction video. I was immediately interested in the project because of the visual style on display — source code represented as nested circles; an earthy brown instead of the usual dark/light theme. But as the video progressed, Ella showed off a scattering of little ideas that each seemed strikingly clever and obvious in hindsight. You'd drag one of the circle "forms" to the bottom right to evaluate it, or to the bottom left to delete it. The sides of the screen are flanked by "formbars" that hold, well, whatever you want. You can reconfigure these formbars to your exact liking. Everything is manipulated with drag. The interface exudes a sense that it was designed with wholly different goals and tastes than what we usually see in visual programming projects — perfect subject matter for our show. This episode was sponsored by Glide, and the transcript was sponsored by Replit — thanks to them both for making this possible. The show notes (with copious links) and transcript are available here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/054 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scott Anderson has spent the better part of a decade working on end-user programming features for VR and the metaverse. He's worked on playful creation tools in the indie game Luna, scripting for Oculus Home and Horizon Worlds at Facebook, and a bunch of concepts for novel programming interfaces in virtual reality. Talking to Scott felt a little bit like peeking into what's coming around the bend for programming. For now, most of us do our programming work on a little 2D rectangle, with a clear split between the world around the computer and the one inside it. That might change — we may find ourselves inside a virtual environment where the code we write and the effects of running it happen in the space around us. We may find ourselves in that space with other people, also doing their own programming. This space might be designed, operated, and owned by a single megacorp with a specific profit motive. Scott takes us through these possibilities — how things are actually shaping up right now and how he feels about where they're going, having spent so much time exploring this space. This episode was sponsored by Glide, and the transcript was sponsored by Replit — thanks to them both for making this possible. The show notes (with copious links) and transcript are available here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/053 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The name Replit will be familiar to regular listeners of our show. The backstory and ambitions behind the project, however, I bet will be news to you. Amjad Masad, the founder and first programmer of Replit, is interviewed by Steve Krouse in this episode from the vault — recorded back in 2019, released for the first time today. Amjad shares the stories of how he taught himself to use a computer by secretly observing his father, his early experiments with Emscripten building VMs for the web, the founding of Replit, and how their community has exploded in popularity in recent years. Some of the conceptual discussions touch on Scheme, potential futures of visual programming, Sketchpad, and GRAIL. The transcript for this episode was sponsored, as ever, by Replit. The show notes and transcript are available right here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/052 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.