Future of Coding Weekly 2020/10 Week 4

[marianoguerra]

📢 LIVE Programming Workshop 💻 Read-Eval-Synth Loop 🕹 Microsoft TileCode 📝 Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing 📗 Beautiful Software Initiative

Two Minute Week

🎥 2020-10-20: defining functions via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Today's video wraps up implementing the mock-up I shared exactly a month ago.[1]

I'm quite happy with how this is turning out. The environment is visual but dense. I imagine the ability to juggle multiple sandboxes on the right, all sharing a common set of function definitions on the left. Functions still can't be edited, but the mechanisms for editing are in place, and you'll be able to see all sandboxes update as you edit function definitions.

The one major drawback -- that Ivan Reese won't like -- is the extensive use of name-punning to make this work. By construction, function definitions share the same names for their arguments as the ones you chose for their first call. As a result you almost immediately have two xs on the same line that look the same and seem to behave identically, but mean subtly different things.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/mu

1. https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1600645382040000

📷 20201020-postfix-function-definition.png

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💬 Chris Maughan

🧵 conversation

In lieu of an update video, here's a super-wide screenshot of my Live Coding tool; showing the audio components.

I've spent the last few weeks fixing the build system to use vcpkg (this is a massive change, but a massive improvement too; it should really reduce the time I waste making builds work. It also makes my CMake files smaller and simpler). I estimate I spend 25% of my time fixing cross platform builds/CI. etc. This has to stop; I have lost weeks to figuring out all these issues. Discovering that vcpkg solves most of my problems was a revelation; it is laughably easy to build complex libraries and link them into your projects.

I've also been updating to the ImGui docking branch. This is going to be great for live coding; giving you more surface area to put your various windows and tools. This screenshot is an example across my 3 monitors; I will shortly have the visual pieces up and running too.

📷 image.png

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Our Work

📝 http://thedocly.io/ via Shubhadeep Roychowdhury

🧵 conversation

We are excited to launch Docly beta !

🏆 Docly generates comments for any Python functions. First version generates one-liner and we intend to improve it over time.

👉 To test the beta on your own code : http://thedocly.io/

🔩 Docly leverages AI trained on open source repos (Github)

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📝 Message Not Understood via Eric Gade

🧵 conversation

Hi everyone -- just wanted to shoot you a reminder about Message Not Understood, our documentary examining the history of personal computing through the lesser-known voices of many of the key players involved. We have just 7 days left on our funding campaign, so please spread the word if you can!

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🎥 Instadeq dynamic data filters with select or slider using triggers via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

Here's a demo of dynamic data filters: Populate a select or slider from a source and use it to filter a chart using forms and triggers

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Thinking Together

📝 Beautiful Software Initiative via Stefan Lesser

🧵 conversation

I’ve become one of the fifteen students in this year’s Building Beauty and https://www.buildingbeauty.org/beautiful-software — the postgraduate course on Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order with an additional seminar for “computer people” to find out how to transfer his ideas into the software industry.

It’s been a busy first three weeks and I’ve already learned a lot, which I hope to share eventually. I’m even more convinced now that Alexander has figured out a deep truth about designing and building beautiful things that absolutely needs to be adapted to the software world.

I’d love to invite those here who are interested in Alexander’s work to connect so we can attempt to bridge the two communities — in which way exactly I’m still contemplating and open to suggestions. At least I wanted to start a thread here which could become anything from an AMA about the course to a beacon for those who’d be interested in activities that might happen around this topic spanning both communities (I could picture an online event bringing us all together). If you want to be part of that, leave a comment in the thread and feel free to suggest ideas or ask me anything…

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Content

🎥 RacketCon 2020 - Day 2 - Session 4 - Ben Greenman & Matthias Felleisen via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

Another video from RacketCon worth watching is the AMA session with Racket's "chief philosopher", Matthias Felleisen. Starting at 31:20 with an interesting discussion about types.

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📝 Read-Eval-Synth Loop via Christopher Galtenberg

🧵 conversation

"We present the new notion of Read-Eval-Synth Loop (RESL), which extends REPL by providing in-place synthesis on parts of the expression provided by the user. Our experiments show that RESL reduces programmers’ effort, increases their task completion rate, and improves program correctness."

"The user does not know how to construct a range, so instead, they mark the current array expression as a portion of the program that should be replaced. This is called a sketch: the user expresses their intent to keep everything outside this sub-expression as is, while turning it into a hole to be replaced with a new expression."

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🎥 Depot Data Editor Tutorial - Edit JSON Data in VS Code with Spreadsheet Interface via Scott Anderson

🧵 conversation

Interesting looking structured JSON editor made in Visual Studio Code. It is designed to be a visual editor for structured game data (common in games, actually), but appears to be pretty generic. Makes me want to investigate VSCode Custom Editor functionality

🔗 Depot Data Editor - Visual Studio Marketplace

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📝 LIVE Programming workshop via Brian Hempel

🧵 conversation

We’ve posted the talk list for this year’s (virtual) LIVE Programming workshop. We plan to record the presentations, but if you register you can watch in real-time on November 17 and participate in the lively discussion. (And all prices are greatly discounted this year without a physical venue.) Hope to see you there!

🔗 Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE)

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🕹 Microsoft TileCode: Design, Code, and Play Games on MakeCode Arcade Devices via Scott Anderson

🧵 conversation

Microsoft made a Makecode inspired programming environment for building games on low powered embedded handhelds (Gameboy like). It looks like it uses rules rewriting and is relatively powerful. I've been wanting to prototype an environment like this for a long time (maybe on Playdate or something). I need to dig into it a little more but it looks cool

I found it through this kickstarter Xtron Pro: Creating Games, Learning Programming and More

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📝 Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

I stumbled into this page + website y’day and it really got me thinking:

I love the elucidation of the “seven laws of personal computing” and the meta-approach of trying to codify more precisely what the ideals & aspirations for personal computing should be. I’m sure people have discussed this site before, but I”m discovering it for the 1st time 💯

as a tangent, I love the use of “operator” over “user” (which has been taken over by consumer internet companies and IMO degraded!)

“operator” makes me think of a “forklift operator”, aka a tool user. It shifts our collective lenses appropriately I feel!

📷 image.png

[marianoguerra]

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