Introductions

[guidoism]

Let's all introduce ourselves here. I think it would be a good way to discover people with similar interests.

I'm Guido. I've worked in the industry for 18 years doing mostly infrastructural software for large distributed systems. I recently quit my job, moved to a lower cost-of-living area, and began studying areas of computing that have always interested me but I'd never had the time to explore. I guess it's something like a sabbatical.

I'm particularly interested in coding with concise notation, mathematically correct code, high code density (programs measured in KBs), UIs running on dedicated hardware, typography, spreadsheets as an example of programming for normal people (we can learn something from this), and reconfigurable computing (e.g., FPGAs as a platform instead of an ISA).

I'm calling my project Escape the Local Maxima.

I've honestly not figured out where my research will go, whether I will end up building something myself or whether it will just end up as a resource for others.

And what excites me about this group of people is that there actually exists others who are thinking along similar lines. And I don't want to end up a lone developer designing my stuff in the dark. I want other people to bounce ideas off of. And I want others to bounce ideas off of me too!

[coderextreme]

Intro: worked in R&D for 25 years, on software visualization/programming by demonstration, portable distributed and non-distributed user interfaces, scientific visualization for a 192-beam laser, etc. Now working on X3D JSON loader and writing a pseudo-parser/event generator/handler for X3DOM scripting. Interests include many types of visualization, automated generative testing (scripting generated code, roundtripping data formats), schema generation from object models, code generation. Research interests include analyzing differences between artifacts, recognizing and generating instances from meta/grammars/schema or neural networks.

[davelab6]

I'm a software freedom activist and typeface designer, and I've worked to liberate typography globally for about 10 years now - mainly as a Program Manager in the Google Fonts team. I also initiated the Cantarell typeface project, used as the UI typeface for GNOME 3. Back in 2016 I did a GSOC mentorship for Sugar Labs, to initiate a children's font editor app, which didn't get very far, but it led me to the fonc list. I'm interested to apply the ideas of this community to typeface design.

[vladimir-vg]

Hey everyone! I'm so glad that I've found this community, that I'm not alone with this obsession.

I was always curious about programming languages, even tried to make my own. About four years ago I've watched "Inventing by Principle" by Bret Victor. It really amazed me, I never thought that programming can be that interactive. Then I forgot about that for two years.

Later I stumbled on "Future of Programming" and "Seeing Spaces" by the same author. This time it completely blew me away. Suddenly I got clear vision and understanding of what programming may become. It feels like visual programming and direct manipulation are inevitable.

Since then I'm making my humble attempts to make it closer.

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I've seen so many ambitious and outstanding projects started and abandoned. They explored wonderful ideas yet had small adoption. Problems that they solved were too far away from everyday boring problems, and as a result -- from wide adoption.

I believe that it's very important to build something that actually can be used in production, used by real people in everyday life. Projects that solve everyday pain. Real everyday use may bring new developers and money. More importantly it will bring widespread recognition of the ideas implemented in project.

So what is this project, in the middle of visual programming and boring everyday problems in production?

I found it in tracing and logs visualization. Once we get used to read visual maps instead of hundreds lines of logs we may spread and develop this culture, enable a habit of visual thinking. Once this milestone is established, visual programming and direct manipulation might be much easier to achieve.

Currently I'm working on project that visualizes Erlang traces and logs. It collects information about actors inside Erlang node and displays them on timeline. https://github.com/vladimir-vg/batiscaph

Recently I've recorded a video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNr7o9eg4Ck&t=1s

It's in very early stage and can't be used in production yet.

[pel-daniel]

Hi !!

When I was working as a teacher in a coding bootcamp, I saw first hand the troubles the beginners have with learning to program.

I started working on tools to make programming easier. Some visual tools that I have made:

• git init. An animated tutorial of the basic commands of git.
• lambda bricks. A visual programming environment for functional programming.
• Animated examples of map & reduce higher order functions.
• An exploration of recursion. As an example I use the factorial function.

The last I want to share is a draft I wrote for a Conversational Programming Language. I'm still at the idea stage, trying to define scope and tools to use to develop it.

I'm currently interested in semantic/projectional editors, conversational programming languages and programming languages for storytellers.

[gisborne]

Guyren Howe here. I've become particularly interested in making programming more efficient by making it less necessary, through combining very high-level REST-based components in a client-programmable API.

I'm also interested in making much more computing accessible to non-programmers, along the lines of the Mother of All Demos or Parc. Think FileMaker or Access, but without all the tedious manual UI designing. Also open-source, network-native and where the user can manipulate any sort of webby thing or common data structure, rather than just relations.

These two things are the same.

I have a project called FREST (for Functional REST) to implement this. It's not yet at the demoable stage, but it is being actively worked. Give me a few months.

[pel-daniel]

Hi @gisborne, sounds interesting! What kind of people would be using FREST? Programmers or non-programmers?

[gisborne]

On Jun 8, 2018, at 21:17 , Daniel Garcia notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi @gisborne https://github.com/gisborne, sounds interesting! What kind of people would be using FREST? Programmers or non-programmers?

Both. It lets you do computation — data storage, retrieval and manipulation — for standard tasks through GUI manipulations. The result can be expressed in a GUI, but can also be accessed through an API.

Flipping things around, you can create new such endpoints as a developer by writing the function that does the actual thing in question as a function. Supply suitable metadata about types accepted and returned, other relevant functions, and lexical information for the UI, and you can tie into the ecosystem.

As everything has a URL, you can join data structures together freely — store references to functions in a database table, say. And the HTML UI representations can be freely embedded in each other, because the behavior of things and links between them are similarly standardized.

[rtens]

Hello everyone,

I'm a software developer based in Berlin and have been trying to figure out how to "fix programming" since I wrote my diploma thesis about my first take on it in 2011. Didn't take my thinking seriously though until I read Victor's essay What can a Technologist do about Climate Change in 2016 and decided to make "Increasing Software Literacy" my life goal.

My current project to do that is called zells and its hypothesis is that 99% of the cost of software is caused by Accidental Complications so I wanna build a software platform that avoids all of them. How hard can it be, right?

Since working on it side-by-side with freelance project didn't pan out so great, I decided to invest 13 weeks (which started last week) full-time into this idea and was lucky enough to have been invited to the Software Architecture group at the Hasso-Plattner Institut as a visiting researcher. My goal for the next weeks is to record multiple demos and maybe write some papers which I hope will help me find collaborators and/or funding.

I'm very happy to have found this community which has already lead to many interesting people, projects and ideas. I especially like this list.

[asmodehn]

Hi everyone,

I discovered this repo because I finally had a bit of free time and wanted to play with eve, only to learn that things have slowed down in the recent months... but on the upside, here I am now :-)

I have been writing software professionally for 15 years now, and even more outsode of the company environment to understand how the world works and how people think... I ve worked on distributed system in simulations (HLA) robotics(ROS) and various web backends and custom MMO game clusters.

I guessed I recently had enough of rewriting again and again the same basic concept in yet another language, in yet a different setting, to find out later that noone else around understood the code, or the reasoning behind it... because they were too busy reinventing the wheel somewhere else, or implementing trivial things because of mandatory updates and painful maintenance. All this could be much better, and probably everyone around here I have quite a few ideas as how we can make that happen.

So these days I'm keeping busy reviewing mathematical foundations, computational models, various semantic models, etc. I ll read what i can on this repo and I ll try to come up with some useful comments issues and new topics when I can.

Basic idea is to make the program write itself, via learning developer interactions, and therefore designing a language for reading, and occastional distributed edits, but not writing as a first usecase. It follows that Semantics is the core, but Syntax should be an afterthought. People will learn from interacting, memorize from drawing, and use what is used in their direct environment.