Feeling of Computing

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 Better by Richard P. Gabriel Worse is Better is Worse, definitely not by Richard P. Gabriel Is Worse Really Better? by Richard P. Gabriel Links Phlogiston Theory Phlogiston the excellent chiptune musician. Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life, by Conor Oberst. Not to be confused with Conal Elliott, who introduced the original meaning of functional reactive programming in his work on Fran. Peter Gabriel - Games Without Frontiers Pilot: A Step Toward Man-Computer Symbiosis Jimmy's talk Paradigms Without Progress: Kuhnian Reflections on Programming Practice There's some sporadic discussion of Philip Wadler (who Ivan playfully calls "Phil"), specifically his claim that programming languages have some bits that are invented and some bits that are discovered. While we're here, make sure you've seen the best 15 seconds in Strange Loop history. Peter 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/58Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alan Kay, co-creator of the Dynabook, and Adele Goldberg discuss the benefits of visual programming, exploring glitches in Game Boy, physical book design concepts, communication in software systems, societal complexities, computers as a meta medium, balancing present usability with future potential, children's computer preferences, computer animation evolution, creativity of kids using Smalltalk, limitations in paper evaluation and music composition tools, and the challenges in early music software.

symbol-manipulation.comcollaboration.comthought-experiments.orgbehaviorism.comtheatre.jssystem.orgevolution.capithy.comreplit.comsummary.co.ukcringe.netfutureofcoding.orgprogramming.comSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.js — Enabling designers to code, programmers to design — empowering everyone to create. Glide — Anyone can make their own apps, with a GUI builder backed by a spreadsheet. Replit — An online REPL-driven dev environment with all the batteries you could ask for. (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/55Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee 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/054Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee 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/053Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee 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/052Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, I'll be talking to Toby Schachman, who many of you are surely familiar with thanks to an incredible string of projects he's released over the past decade, including Recursive Drawing back in 2012, Apparatus in 2015, and most recently Cuttle which opened to the public this past week. All of these projects superficially appear to be graphics editors, but by interacting with them you actually create a program that generates graphics. Their interfaces are wildly different from both traditional programming tools and traditional graphics apps. If you are not familiar with these projects, I strongly recommend that you actually go and play them (they all run in the browser), or watch the Strange Loop talk where Toby demos Apparatus and explains the thinking behind it. This episode was sponsored by Glide, and the transcript was sponsored by Replit — thanks to them both for making this possible. The show notes and transcript are available right here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/051Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mary Rose Cook is a programmer with.. just.. so many side projects, oh my — and, she works at Airtable. Mary created Gitlet, a version of Git in 1000 lines of JavaScript with extensive annotation. That might be her most well-known project, but of particular interest to our community are her programming environments Isla and Code Lauren. These projects explore syntax, learnability, execution visualization, and other surfaces of the development experience that I think we all would love to see reinvented. Mary and I talk about the design decisions behind these projects, naturally. But more importantly, we look at the ways they failed to achieve the goals Mary had for them, and what we should all be mindful of on our investigations into the future of computing. The discussion also touches on the theme of "escape hatches", picks up a few lessons in UI design from the video games Into The Breach and The Witness, and reflects on what people think programming is like before they actually learn what it really is. Lighthearted but full of wisdom. We have a new sponsor for today's episode: Glide. If you're excited about making end-user software development a reality, go to glideapps.com/jobs and apply to join their team. As ever, the transcript for this episode is sponsored by Replit. The show notes and transcript are available right here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/050Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ravi Chugh is a (recently-tenured 🎉) prof at the University of Chicago. He’s famous for leading the Sketch-n-Sketch project, an output-directed, bidirectional programming tool that lets you seamlessly jump back and forth between coding and directly manipulating your program’s output. The tool gives you two different projected editing interfaces for the same underlying program, so that you can leverage the different strengths of each. In the interview we talk about the principles of bidirectional editing, the team and history behind the Sketch-n-Sketch project, benchmarks and values that can be used to assess these sorts of novel programming interfaces, possible future directions for Sketch-n-Sketch and the field more broadly, and a bunch more. It’s a long one — almost two and a half hours — but it’s packed with thought and charm. The transcript for this episode was sponsored by Repl.it. Show notes and the full transcript are available here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/049Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.