Future of Coding

I got to play with Dynamicland for a couple of hours last week, thanks to a meetup organised by Steve Krouse and Omar Rizwan. Steve runs the Future Of Coding podcast ( https://futureofcoding.org/ ) and Slack community, and Omar is a researcher at Dynamicland. Last year Omar posted an excellent, detailed breakdown of GeoKit, a map toolkit he created at Dynamicland; it includes much of the technical detail and videos you probably want if you've read this far: https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/

My own feelings about Dynamicland, after a couple of hours there, are mixed but mostly positive:

* Like many who experience it, I don't have a handle on DL's most valuable differentiators as a platform. But that's OK, because it feels like they're not trying to achieve that yet; it's more about just experimenting. We're so unused to computing with this UX model that it's going to take a while to find its best uses.

* Plus, DL is chasing an idea for which the hardware barely exists yet. Ideally, it would be cheaply sensing full 3D in the environment, and projecting higher contrast visuals at all angles.

* Even so, there are some easy, playful ideas they've done that are wonderful. For example, an animator script which lays out three paper-sized outlines to the right of wherever you place the script, and then rapidly cycles the images it captures from those outlines. So, if you want to teach animation, you just draw a cycle across three pieces of paper, put them in…

A few months ago, I watched some videos by Brett Victor and decided I wanted to develop a visual programming language. That led me to https://futureofcoding.org/ and its slack channel.

There was some cool stuff happening on the server, and the admin was doing his best to elevate things, but that slack channel was also the last stop for some people before they descended into templeOS levels of madness.

Right around the time I was joining, the admin posted in the meta channel that, with a heavy heart, he had finally banned [the developer of beads, I feel weird calling him out by name]. Apparently he had been too argumentative and stubborn for the server to further tolerate.

It left a weird taste in my mouth about the future of coding slack channel. On one hand, you don't want toxic people in your community. On the other hand, the server was clearly a channel of last resort for a lot of people with a lot of crazy ideas. Kicking out one if its more prominent members to toil in solitude felt kind of gross.

Its interesting to see that, a few months after being banned, the beads project seems to be materializing.

Orca is amazing, and it's creator Devine Lu Linvega is inspiring too.

Listen to this future of coding podcast where he is interviewed about Orca: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045 and about making your own tools: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044

The Future of Coding podcast is a treasure.

Edit: excerpt from the Devine Lu Linvega's intro:

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Devine Lu Linvega and his partner Rekka live on a sailboat. He makes art, music, software, and other cultural artifacts. When Photoshop’s DRM required that he maintain a connection to the internet, he wrote his own creative suite. When his MacBook died in the middle of the ocean, he switched to Linux with hardware he could service. His electricity comes from solar panels, and every joule counts — so that’s out with Chrome and Electron and in with Scheme, C, assembly, and maybe someday Forth.

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Yes that’s the one! It was Chris Granger’s project that Jamie worked on for a while (along with Josh Rob and Eric and myself). Eve came around at a time when Bret Victor’s videos were very popular and a lot of people were unhappy with the state of the web and programming in general.

Since then there’s been a pretty relentless if niche community growing around the idea. Eve is gone but the idea lives on in many different communities, and I think it’s clear the same spirit that spawned Eve motivates Jamie’s conference.

The primary venue for this kind of work has been the Live! workshop at SplashCon.

https://liveprog.org/

There’s also a community of people working on projects of this sort:

https://futureofcoding.org/

I think Jamie’s conference would be a good addition to this community, especially being in the spring, since Live is in the fall.

Hi all! Developer here before first coffee

I'm actively working on natto.dev and it really is in "preview". I'm excited about the future of programming and having a canvas to explore it on. still looking for "crazier" ideas - my favorite current one is dragging a column out of a table. https://twitter.com/_paulshen/status/1366801887341649924

The more I work on it, the more confident I am that there's something there. If you try it, I'd love to hear your feedback!

natto takes inspiration from a whole lot of work. non-exhaustive list: Yahoo Pipes, Excel, design tools (Figma), Observable, darklang, GToolkit, SmallTalk (repl-driven), http://joshuahhh.com/projects/pane/, http://www.lamdu.org/, https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/

As much as I love natto (the food), I'll likely rename it at some point. Pronunciation hit rate has been 0%

The Future of Coding (https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/)

It's become far too long and not focused enough for me to enjoy lately, but it's a nice change of pace to hear about new or lost ideas, rather than hearing about mundane tech I see and hear about every day anyway. Less Rust, Javascript and k8s, and more revisiting papers and moonshot ideas from the 80s for me, please!

A great introduction to this podcast is the Devine Lu Linvega (of 100 Rabbits fame) double episode about writing his own tools, and orca, his music live coding platform.

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/044

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/045