Future of Coding Weekly 2020/04 Week 3

[marianoguerra]

This issue collects resources for the newsletter of the year/month/week that should be in the title

If you want to contribute open the issue and paste a resource you think is worth sharing in the newsletter and comment on the issue of the week.

Use markdown for formatting, ideally a contribution should have a title a link and optionally a description.

Post helpers: https://marianoguerra.github.io/future-of-coding-weekly/helpers.html

Use comment reactions on issue comments to up vote/down vote/whatever each submission the reactions that have a clear sense of positive/negative will be considered to rank the submissions of the week.

[marianoguerra]

💬 malleable.systems HN thread. Via Shalabh Chaturvedi (🧵Slack Thread)

[marianoguerra]

💭 Stefan Lesser said: (🧵Slack Thread)

I came across a PICO-8 tutorial today. While I was aware of the platform, I didn’t know much about it. What I found most interesting is that the limitations, in particular the restriction to 8192 “tokens” that your Lua source code can maximally have, made the person conducting the tutorial optimize the code several times to reduce the number of tokens used. He achieved that mostly through basic refactoring, often using the DRY principle, but also sometimes making the code a little more concise/clever/obscure.

This (artificial) limitation adds a dynamic to development for PICO-8 that I find fascinating. It adds a forcing function for “keeping code lean” which I haven’t seen like this anywhere else. The only other similar thing I can think of is the 140/280 character limit on Twitter. Or maybe demoscene contest categories that limit the code and/or binary sizes to a certain amount of bytes.

[marianoguerra]

📝 Programming Languages are not Languages. Via Justin By Alvaro Videla (🧵Slack Thread)

[marianoguerra]

💬 Josh Cho said: (🧵Slack Thread)

Are there any languages with explicit focus (and philosophy) around intermediary steps between ideas and working code? Modern programming languages feel like I must, in part, produce completed structures of code, rather than brainstorming and exploring. Programming inevitably alternates the code from working to not working to working to not working, etc, and we would benefit from languages that were more explicit about facilitating the ‘not working’ states. From my rough intuition, the ‘not working’ states of code outweigh ‘working’ state in terms of time and importance (e.g. compiler for code that is exploratory but does not work).

REPL, for a very simple idea, is praised so much (and so widely used) perhaps for this reason — it facilitates intermediate steps. This would be a rough parallel to how Bret Victor mentions that “ideas are important” to him. I looked at Exploratory Programming, but it doesn’t seem to capture exactly what I want (i.e. goes a bit too shallow).

[marianoguerra]

🐦 The airtable scripting environment. Interesting tradeoffs. Via Christopher Galtenberg By Jonathan Edwards (🧵Slack Thread)

The airtable scripting environment. Interesting tradeoffs. JS. Terminal-like interaction. Nice auto-completion on APIs and user data model. Nice tethered docs with runnable examples customized to user data model.

Creating a scripting environment for Airtable that anyone can use

[marianoguerra]

📝 The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories. Via Kartik Agaram (🧵Slack Thread)

For pioneering computer scientist Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression.

"The Art of Computer Programming is a manifesto. It describes the way I love to do math and the way I wish I had been taught."

[marianoguerra]

Two polls this week, both pretty close:

• I'm building my FoC project in a

  • Dynamically typed language: 20 votes
  • Statically Typed Language: 21 votes

• ...And my FoC project has a

  • Dynamic Type System: 14 votes
  • Static Type System: 10 votes

[marianoguerra]

🐦 is this what happened to SQL, too?. Via Daniel Garcia By Omar Rizwan (🧵Slack Thread)

just as CSS was made so users could choose their own styles, SQL was originally made so non-programmers could write their own queries…

From Punched Cards to "Big Data": ASocial History of Database Populism

[marianoguerra]

📢 We have a new channel — #two-minute-week by Ivan Reese (🧵Slack Thread)

In this new channel, you can post a two minute video recapping your progress on your FoC project once each week. This will be a fun way for us to keep up on everyone's projects, get inspired, and distill our thinking into a concentrated form.

There's a writeup with more info and recording tips on the website: https://futureofcoding.org/two-minute-week

This is a brand new channel and a new mode of interaction for us, so if you have ideas or suggestions for neat things we can do now that this channel exists, drop them in #meta.

I'm excited to see all the neat and varied projects we're all building, and follow their progress from week to week. :beers:

[marianoguerra]

📝 Relations as First-Class Citizen - A Paradigm Shift for Software/Database Interoperability. Via Jacob Chapman (🧵Slack Thread)

[marianoguerra]

📝 Agile as Trauma. Via Stefan Lesser (🧵Slack Thread)

This post by Dorian Taylor makes a few connections I found interesting:

1. Framing the agile movement as a response to trauma — I suspect many other things in our industry could be framed that way?
2. Composition naturally leads to iterative process — not sure if that “naturally” there is justified, but certainly an observation to ponder.
3. How collaboration is such an important part of the agile approach although “programming itself is a quasi-solipsistic activity. A programmer requires, strictly speaking, no more collaboration than does a novelist or painter.”
4. “[T]he presence of a feature can only indicate to a user if a goal is possible, behaviour will determine how painful it will be to achieve it.” and “[Behavior] blurs the line between “fixing bugs” and “building features”, and coalesces the two into a unitary process of “sculpting behaviour”.

[marianoguerra]

🎥 Storyscript, a new dialog with data. Via Steve Peak (🧵Slack Thread)

I’ve put together another demonstration of Storyscript, illuminating the first dialog-driven development studio blending NLP+DSL+Notebook. If anyone has questions/feedback I would love to engage in a discussion. This demo is mocked, but we are about 50% complete with what you see.

[marianoguerra]

📢 Paul Biggar said: (🧵Slack Thread)

Hey folks, I’m looking for people with experience/interest in Structured Editors to try out Dark’s editor and make suggestions (we’re struggling to make it feel really good and would love some help). If you’d be interested, post/DM your email and I’ll get you an invite

[marianoguerra]

🎥 Two Minute Week Entry by Ivan Reese (🧵Slack Thread)

🎥 #two-minute-week #1 by Vladimir Gordeev (🧵Slack Thread)

A bit about progress on generic tree editor. In my last demo [1] I forgot to show how transition from editing blob to editing a tree works. This video fixes that. Currently I am designing tree storage API and covering it with tests. Source code is not public yet. I plan to open it when editor reaches usable state. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOHNUtw8h5o

🎥 Instadeq Week in Two Minutes #1 by Mariano Guerra (🧵Slack Thread)

🎥 Two Minute Week Entry by Chris Maughan (🧵Slack Thread)

🎥 Here’s my 2 minutes intro of Lamdu! by Yair Chuchem (🧵Slack Thread)

🎥 Beads live coding ep 001 by Edward de Jong (🧵Slack Thread)

... showing off the beginnings of the IDE that will allow the programmer to use a graphical user interface to construct part of the code.

I had originally intended that Beads would be a purely textual language, but customer feedback is overwhelmingly requesting graphical aids and high interactivity.

The IDE for Beads is written in itself, and shows very good compactness as it is only 15k words (approx 4000 lines) so far.

🎥 Mu: the movie by Kartik Agaram (🧵Slack Thread)

[marianoguerra]

https://tinyletter.com/marianoguerra/letters/future-of-coding-weekly-2020-04-week-3