Future of Coding Weekly 2020/03 Week 3

[marianoguerra]

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[marianoguerra]

🐦 Code Tutor. By Jonathan Carter Via Mariano Guerra (🧵Slack Thread)

I feel like the process of learning codebases should be more guided, interactive, and integrated into your editor. Not buried in documentation. To improve onboarding, and make it easy to create such learning assets, I created a "tutorial recorder" for code. It's called Code Tour

[marianoguerra]

📝 Code comments as live wikis in IDEs. By Andrei Chiș Via Mariano Guerra

Utilizing interactive notebooks to document code through examples and custom views.

Glamorous Toolkit is the moldable development environment made of multiple programmable and combinable components. One of the components is Documenter, the engine that makes creating and consuming code documentation and tutorials a beautiful experience directly in the IDE. It enables:

• documentation of existing code
• tutorials
• interactive data notebooks

This article explores the use of Documenter for documenting code.

[marianoguerra]

📝🎥 We made SQL visual - why and how. By Chartio Via Mariano Guerra (🧵Slack Thread)

We have—through thousands of design iterations, dozens of functioning prototypes, several hundred user tests, and countless hours of development—created an interface that truly enables the business user to work with data. We call the interface Visual SQL.

[marianoguerra]

💬 Will Crichton said: I’ve been trading emails with Alan Kay for a few days about CS education. Wanted to share a few thought-provoking snippets with y’all:

In my research group at Parc in the decade of the 70s, we did four major “real object” languages, about three more major designs, and many versions. This is because “what was actually needed” was not a variation on any of the several thousand languages that Jean Samet was able to count by the late 60s. Other research groups at Parc accounted for another 4 or 5 higher level languages and SDKs as well.

Part of the mental tool set for being a “aspirational computer scientist” back then was to know how to make OSs, languages, and new whole computers in a timely fashion. Today it is much easier than back then, but most computer people don’t know how, and don’t.

What seems to be lacking is what we used in order to get most of “personal computing” into an Alto in the 70s in about 10,000 lines of code including the OS with all but a few thousand instructions written in the super high level language -- and all done by less than 10 people (who also had to invent the personal computing ideas and GUI, etc). The secret sauce was a kind of mathematics and design that seems quite missing today combined with an integrated live programming language, live development environment, and hardware all built to support the math and design.

For “CS” learning purposes, just bootstrapping a neat system done by others is probably not the best first experience. But this is an indication that a very large “personal computing experience” can indeed be programmed in a few thousand lines of code via what really counts in computing: Design not bricklaying or “Runnable Math*

A separate “real CS” department -- maybe it should be called “The Systems Sciences Department” for clarity -- would address all these deeper issues.

Check the (🧵Slack Thread) for the discussion.

He continued in another message: Also, I appreciated this polemic:

One manifestation today (and then) is to take a likely good principle -- functional relationships can be powerful and understandable -- and then mess it up by wanting to use “old math function ideas” in the new domain in which both passage and time and the memory of state are both critical elements. This is the critical flaw in today’s “functional programming” enthusiasts.

(🧵Slack Thread)

[marianoguerra]

🌐🎥 The SIEUFERD Project. By Eirik Bakke Via Mariano Guerra

Note: the author is also the creator of ultorg which was already mentioned and is more recent than SIEUFERD.

SIEUFERD is a general-purpose user interface for relational databases. It takes its inspiration from two decades' worth of graphical database applications that were developed, at great expense, to serve niche markets such as seafood trading, music school administration, and refugee camp management, and attempts to generalize their standard UI idioms into a single, universal application that provides most of their features in a schema-independent manner. The proof that this can be done lies in existing general-purpose "killer apps" such as Excel and Tableau; the challenge lies in achieving the same for the generalized relational database use case (think CRUD over data modeled by entity-relationship diagrams).

[marianoguerra]

🐦 An Application Development/Execution Platform for the Rest of Us. Via Peter Abrahamsen By Mel Conway (🧵Slack Thread)

This is about engaging almost everybody in the process of building real-world applications. It develops the rationale for, and will end with, a product concept.

[marianoguerra]

📝 The Flawed History of Graphical User Interfaces. Via Shalabh Chaturvedi By John Ohno (🧵Slack Thread)

Why innovation in computing has been stymied for decades

[marianoguerra]

📝 Readings on Time. Via/By Prathyush (🧵Slack Thread)

Finally got some time to round up the prior art on a largely forgotten idea in computing called managed time. I think this in some ways is what version control does to files, but think of it at a more granular level of variables and functions and the kinds of interactions that will spawn off.

Got the hint initially from Alan Kay’s writings and I think there is a lot of fertile areas here to dig into here: https://prabros.com/readings-on-time

Would love to hear your feedback if I have missed some related material in this post.

[marianoguerra]

https://tinyletter.com/marianoguerra/letters/future-of-coding-weekly-2020-03-week-3

[alltom]

Thanks for going above and beyond with the formatting and links!