Steve Krouse: "Future of Coding"

[d-cook]

I just came across a gold mine called FutureOfCoding.org. The author (Steve Krouse) already has many times more resources there then we have here, and he has put a TON of work and thought into reinventing programming to be more accessible (mainly to children).

His story is similar to some of ours: He came across Alan Kay, Bret Victor (particularly his "Learnable Programming"), Scratch, etc., which has motivated him to start his own organization centered on teaching programming to kids and exploring new ways to reinvent programming. And because he's been able to make a career out of it (I think), he's been able to do much more than most of us can.

I HIGHLY recommend that we explore his ideas, thoughts, and resources, which I suggest doing by reading the material linked at the (very) bottom of his page (bottom to top seems to be chronological) at http://futureofcoding.org, among which are some VERY extensive programmer's diaries of his work, thoughts, resources of interest, etc.

(Of special note among the links on his page is "A Visual History of Eve", which is another initiative that anyone here really ought to know about, if you do not already. So far, that's the best & most through documentation on Eve I've come across).

He seems highly interested in hearing from anyone doing anything similar or with any new ideas or feedback. Let's please reach out to him with (y)our thoughts & ideas (the more of us, the better), as this guy would be INVALUABLE to our cause here -- or perhaps we could provide a great breadth of people and insights to what he's already doing (unlike most of us, he seems to have a real organization / funding, and its what he does for work)

[d-cook]

On a related note, I found this other page while combing through Steve's stuff, which also seems very inline with how some of us see the potential (and need) to reshape software, and what that means (or should mean): "The future of software, the end of apps, and why UX designers should care about type theory", by Paul Chiusano.

(I have not finished reading it, but it already looks promising; this guy might be worth syncing up with as well).

[coderextreme]

I think Croquet is a good example of what is possible, beyond programming environments into shared programming environments. The article reminded me of VRML/X3D, which is supposed to be a WWW of 3D graphics. Probably it went too far in the declarative direction (where are the avatars? What is a client presence? HAnim 2.0? Can we get Microsoft to hook up Kinect?)

However, most of our studies revolve around 2D. How do we adequately merge 2D and 3D (I think that Croquet left something to be desired here). Why are the graphics cards manufacturers driving this instead of users? Why do I only get fragment and vertex shaders?

We have CRUD and REST. Can we do a better job of organizing behavior? SQL? GraphQL?

In TWB/TE we had the concept of “desktop objects” like calculators (equation, string, date editors), documents (document editor), branches (conditional editor), recorders (program editor/debugger),and could be extended to forms and SQL database interactions. The desktop shared a common library of textfields and textareas for data transfer and copy/paste. How many environments can build these desktop objects or editors without dropping into code?

As a potential to bootstrap, I considered an extension to implement a desktop object collection object, but the project lost funding in 1993. We very nearly had Multiuser Programming by Demonstration (Multiuser/threaded Object-Oriented Stack Environment) in 2001 working in my spare time, I think 9 years before MUPbD became a reality. Frankly, the web killed many things that looked interesting, like Fresco, (and brought everything back to text/3270 behavior) and we’re only just starting to recover. Not that we didn’t try to write our own distributed user interface using s-expressions.

Ultimately, I think any tool that considers bootstrapping from data (ASTs) should focus first on the array/list, a type of/and object/map. Those that bootstrap from function or behavior can take another approach (which is?).

Can we think of “reality ‘desktop’ objects” like the typed map that can adequately reflect the concepts and theory to build everything else upon? Is this what Dynamicland is about?

John

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From: Dan Cook Sent: Monday, May 21, 2018 3:43 AM To: d-cook/SomethingNew Cc: Subscribed Subject: Re: [d-cook/SomethingNew] Steve Krouse: "Future of Coding" (#23)

On a related note, I found this other page while combing through Steve's stuff, which also seems very inline with how some of us see the potential (and need) to reshape software, and what that means (or should mean): "The future of software, the end of apps, and why UX designers should care about type theory", by Paul Chiusano. (I have not finished reading it, but it already looks promising; this guy might be worth syncing up with as well). — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[jdjakub]

This is super exciting. I just read this post of his and it brought a smile to my face when he talked about embarrassment about historical accidents, syntax and text, ASTs etc :)

God, I'm reading Chiusano's article and it cheered me up so much. And back in 2013? Damn...