Future of Coding Weekly 2022/10 Week 5

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🎙 Worse is Better 🧠 Making Systems Explainable 🪞 Programming Portals 📄 Future of Text & HyperCard

Our Work

🎙 Future of Coding • Episode 59 - Richard P. Gabriel • Worse is Better via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Following our previous episode on Richard P. Gabriel's Incommensurability paper, we're back for round two with an analysis of what we've dubbed the Worse is Better family of thought products:

• The Rise of Worse Is Better by Richard P. Gabriel
• Worse is Better is Worse by Nickieben Bourbaki
• Is Worse Really Better? by Richard P. Gabriel

Next episode, we've got a recent work by a real up-and-comer in the field. While you may not have heard of him yet, he's a promising young lad who's sure to become a household name.

• Magic Ink by Bret Victor

I am usually really thorough in my editing of the show, but this one I sort of had to rush out the door because the month is rapidly drawing to a close. If anyone spots any weird edits, or anything that sounds out of place, let me know. In particular, the sponsors (which now come at the end of the episode) might be a little rough. Oh well — pays the bills, amirite?

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Thinking Together

💬 Nicholas Yang

🧵 conversation

Does anybody know if there’s a parser generator like tree-sitter, i.e. produces a CST instead of an AST, but that can be used as a compiler frontend? Tree-sitter kinda can be, but it’s not the easiest

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💬 Jim Meyer

🧵 conversation

Had a daydream of an alternative reality where 1% of VC funding that goes into no-code had to fund this community instead, no strings attached. Didn't get to the part of how that'd actually work given the messy nature of people, but sure would be an interesting situation 😄

Where's all the ambition, the sense of adventure, that drove funding in the 60s? A time where the mother of all demos was possible to achieve with a small team that thought outside the box. Have VCs, researchers and funders become disillusioned. Have marketing teams cried wolf too many times. Have people given up on solving the really hard problems at the core of code. Who's picking up the mantle from the Engelbarts and Victors? Who's willing to fund their work and have it become products that changes people's lives.

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💬 Jim Meyer

🧵 conversation

99% of humans think of code as a medium that is too difficult. I don't think the medium is the problem. I think it's the way we've been asking end-users to interact with it:

So far, 99% of human-to-code interactions have been code-as-text, an interaction paradigm with unforgiving syntax and symbolic mental models.

Investments in interaction paradigms for code have almost exclusively focused on code-as-text and code-as-export, but there are other more end-user friendly ways of interacting with code that we can explore.

Let's break down the interaction paradigms for code (tell me if I missed any!):

• Code-as-text (massively explored): You type, the code editor helps you type. Examples: IDEs, Low-Code
• Code-as-export (mostly explored): Code is treated as a secondary source of truth via one-way export flows from some vendor-specific data you're editing. The tool cannot manipulate or understand the code it just exported, and the interaction ends here. Examples: Vector-based UX design tools, No-Code
• Code-as-programming-portals (moderately explored): @Maggie Appleton wrote a great breakdown of this at maggieappleton.com/programming-portals
• Code-as-data (largely unexplored): Direct manipulation of code ASTs/code visualizations/code output. The tool responds to non-textual interaction from the user and reconciles their intent with a corresponding change in the underlying code-as-text storage.
• Code-as-executable (largely unexplored): A code engine/runtime executes code-as-data changes that result from user interactions to give the user instant feedback, closing the feedback loop of the interaction. Related to live-coding, but where live-coding is tied to code-as-text, code-as-executable can respond to changes from code-as-text as well as code-as data.
• Code-as-source-of-truth (massively explored): IDEs, version control systems. The primary interaction consists of reconciling your code interactions with those performed by others, e.g. through merging, pushes, conflict resolution.

There's so much unexplored territory outside the traditional code-as-text and code-as-export interaction paradigms! Would love to know what you think and whether I've missed any 😄

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Content

🎥 Making Systems Explainable — VISSOFT 2022 Keynote via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

Making Systems Explainable — VISSOFT 2022 Keynote

What makes software systems explainable?

As we develop and maintain software, we have questions to ask about the code, but piecing together the answers remains hard.

The main interface the classical IDE offers is a text editor for the source code. Code, documentation, and the running system are disconnected. In this keynote presentation, we will show how software systems can be made explainable with the help of three interacting technologies:

(i) live notebooks that can be used to create narratives that link documentation, source code, and running applications

(ii) example methods that not only perform tests, but produce live examples that can be used within narratives, to explain use cases, scenarios and features, and

(iii) a moldable inspector that can be easily extended with live custom views to answer domain-specific questions about software systems.

With the help of running examples we will show how these technologies work together to provide a radically different kind of development experience.

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🪞 Programming Portals via Ryan Fox

🧵 conversation

Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes

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📗 The Future of Text via Jan Ruzicka

🧵 conversation

Not sure if this was already at some point posted here, but I found this enormous (and full of big names) book about “future of text”

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🃏 Decker: a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior via Riley Stewart

🧵 conversation

New HyperCard just dropped

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https://tinyletter.com/marianoguerra/letters/future-of-coding-weekly-2022-10-week-5