Future of Coding

Tudor Girba builds tools and techniques for improving the productivity and happiness of software teams. He currently works on the Glamorous Toolkit, a "moldable development environment" for Pharo, that developers can easily adopt to suit their needs. Tudor is a self-proclaimed "software environmentalist", sounding the alarm about how quickly we create code, and how slowly we recycle it. https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/036Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Vlad Magdalin is the CEO & co-founder of Webflow, a WYSIWYG website builder and CMS that's a thin layer of abstratction over HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this conversation we discussed Vlad's Bret Victor origin story, the differences between live programming and direct manipulation, and why web design has resisted direct manipulation pro tools for so long. You can find the transcript for this epsisode at futureofcoding.org/episodes/035#transcriptSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Katherine Ye is a PhD student at CMU, where she works on representation, including programming languages, visualizations, notations, and interfaces to enable thinking and creating. She's been affiliated with MIT CSAIL, Princeton, Distill at Google Brain, and the Recurse Center. In this conversation we discuss Penrose, her project to _democraize visual intuition_. Katherine envisions "a magical machine where you can dump in a math textbook and out comes a fully-illustrated math textbook, or more specifically a platform where you can simply type mathematical notation in plain text and automatically get many useful and beautiful diagrams out illustrating the notation." It's a fascinating project in the intersection of mathematics, intuition, education, visualization, communication, programming, domain specific languages... basically, all of the interesting topics in one project. As you'd expect in a conversation about the edges of representation, this is a wide-ranging conversation that I can described by a collection of keywords that came up: embodied intuition code as rhetoric asemic language Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. univalence, homotopy, equivalence, equality modeling the notation of mathematics knot notation, dance notation, and the periodic table of juggling notation a studio class on notation design explorable explanations speculative nonfiction the unexpected futures next door Transcript provided by repl.it at https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/34#transcriptSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Exploration of democratizing programming, crowd-sourcing software quality, composability, customizability, and self-teaching. Vision to manipulate software for clear thinking. Challenges in historical struggles for suffrage. Functional reactive concepts in programming for UI development. Importance of comprehensibility in software systems. Plans to improve TypeScript setup. Unique ideas on user identification and version control innovations. Maintaining work balance and reflections on past experiences. Support from the community for podcast sustainability.

Quinn Slack of Sourcegraph believes in low-hanging fruit. Before we improve programming in all the fancy ways, he has a list of all the little improvements and features we need to make available to all developers, such as jump-to-definition, autocomplete, and automatic formatting. In this conversation, we learn about the technical challenges to brining code intelligence to all editors, and Sourcegraph's chosen solutions, such as the Langauge Server Protocol and the Sourcegraph extension API. Quinn explains how Sourcegraph code search is so effective without resorting to any fancy machine learning. We also discuss the trade-offs of open-sourcing a devtools company from Day 1, how to find like-minded investors, and how to "win the hearts and minds of developers." Notes and transcript at futureofcoding.org/episodes/32Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two years ago, Nadia Eghbal "stumbled onto the internet's biggest blindspot": sustainability of open-source. Her Ford Foundation report "Roads and Bridges" became an instant classic. She shined a light on the underappreciated roles of maintainers and how difficult it was for even vital projects to get enough funding for a single person full time. In this conversation, we discuss how she found "stumbled onto" this problem initially, and her road from the Ford Foundation to GitHub and now Protocol Labs. We discuss the challenges of indepdendent research and remote work... and how being able to find amazing friends and co-conspirators on Twitter somehow makes it all better. Nadia lays out her vision for the future of open source, and how we can tackle the human side of scaling open-source development. She also gives us a sneak preview of her current work on a new economic model for understanding how open-source software consumption scales. It doesn't scale costlessly, because "you have to make continual changes to it, either because people are submitting changes back to it, but also because software degrades over time. Knowledge degrades over time. You can't just release something once and be done with it." Notes and transcript at futureofcoding.org/episodes/31Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How do we maintain millions of lines of code? For example, the Social Security Administration has 60-million-lines of COBOL. James Koppel is building tools to help tame these kinds of beasts. His current work is on decreasing the costs to build developer tools by allowing the same tool to work on a variety of languages. James Koppel is a Carnegie Mellon CS grad, Thiel Fellow, entrepreneur, educator, and currently PhD student at MIT. We talk about his experience withprogram repair, program sythesis, code comprehension, and many other cutting-edge fields relevant to the future of software engineering. Transcript and episode notes: futureofcoding.org/episodes/30Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My research recap episodes are back! This is the first I've recorded since the end of 2017. I discuss my new mentor-mentee relationship with Jonathan Edwards, my upcoming new paper on functional reactive programming, my move to London, my longer-term goals, and other various musings about abstractions, monads, and data ninja playgrounds. futureofcoding.org/reflections/13Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many of you have heard about Dynamicland, Bret Victor's new project. Omar Rizwan comes on the podcast this week to tell us all about it. He recently wrote an amazing write up about it, [Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit](https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/), that I'd highly reccomend to everyone interested in the future of computing. futureofcoding.org/episodes/28Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

David K Piano is bringing explicit software modeling to the web with his xstate library. He gives talks around the world about statecharts, and is cooking up a new SaaS service that will help developers model and understand their application using statecharts. In this conversation, David and I discuss the benefits of declarative languages, such as CSS, the principle of least power,  musical notation, and Facebook Origami. futureofcoding.org/episodes/27Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.