The Future of Coding podcast features interviews with toolmakers, researchers, computational artists, educators, and engineers, all with compelling viewpoints on what the future of computing could be.
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Magic Ink by Bret Victor
Before the time-travelling talks, the programmable rooms, the ladders and rocket launchers, we had the first real Bret Victor essay: Magic Ink. It set the stage for Bret's later explorations, breaking down the very idea of "software" into a few key pieces and interrogating them with his distinct focus, then clearly demoing a way we could all just do it better. All of Bret's works feel simultaneously like an anguished cry and a call to arms, and this essay is no exception. For the next episode, we're reading Programming as Theory Building as Peter Naur, with a little bit of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind thrown in for good measure. Links Four Hundred of the most Chart-Topping Thoughts of All Time: Inventing On Principal Stop Drawing Dead Fish Drawing Dynamic Visualizations Dynamicland Paper Programs by JP Posma was inspired by Dynamicland. "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." from Halt and Catch Fire Charticulator is Microsoft Research's take on a _Drawing Dynamic Visualizations_-esq tool. Jimmy's Fender Jazz bass looks like this, but red, but like a decade older, but like $600 at the time. We could probably post parts of this episode as Boyfriend Roleplay on YouTube. Fitts's Law is but one thing we've learned about the industrial design aspect of building good software. The Witness is a game where communicating ideas through (essentially) graphic design is the whole entire point of the game. If you haven't played it, know that it comes highly recommended by plenty of folks in the community. A "red letter Bible" is a Bible in which the words spoken by Jesus are colored red, to make them easier to identify. Toph Tucker has a pretty cool personal website. It's rare to see these sorts of sites nowadays, and they're always made by adventuresome programmers, trendy design agencies, or their clients. In the Flash era, it felt like everyone had a website like this, for better and for worse. tldraw is a beautiful little browser-based drawing tool by Steve Ruiz. What few things it does, it does exceptionally well. John while Henry had had had had had had had had had been my preference. #devlog-together is the channel on our Future of Coding slack community where members post small, frequent updates about what they're working on. The (Not Boring) apps are arguably a counterpoint to Bret's theses about information apps and harmful interaction, where the interaction and graphic design are balanced against being maximally-informative, toward being silly and superfluous, to great effect. Did you know there's a hobby horse, but also a hobby horse? I didn't! There are a few examples of folks doing FoC work that, in Ivan's view, align well with the values Bret outlines in Magic Ink: Szymon Kaliski's projects for Ink & Switch, summarized in his Strange Loop talk, Programmable Ink. Mock Mechanics is an environment for building mechanisms by Felipe Reigosa. PANE by Josh Horowitz inverts the usual node-wire programming pattern by putting data in the nodes and data transformation in the wires. Robot Odyssey was a 1984 game for the Apple II (and some other, lesser systems) in which players would go inside various robots to reprogram them. Music featured in this episode: Wash Machine, from the unfinished 2014 album Sneaky Dances Shaun's Amaj Rebirth, created in November 2022 for a friend named — you guessed it — Shaun. Hey! Send us questions we can answer on the show. Like, "How do you keep bread warm?" Or, "What's so great about concatenative languages?" We'll answer them. Send them here: Jimmy Ivan Or just DM one of us in the FoC Slack. futureofcoding.org/episodes/060See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel
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 Links The JIT entitlement on iOS is a thing that exists now. Please, call me Nickieben — Mr. Bourbaki is my father. A pony is a small horse. Also, horses have one toe. Electron lets you build cross-platform apps using web technologies. The apps you build in it are, arguably, doing a bit of "worse is better" when compared to equivalent native apps. Bun is a new JS runner that competes somewhat with NodeJS and Deno, and is arguably an example of "worse is better". esbuild and swc are JS build tools, and are compared to the earlier Babel. The graphs showing the relative lack of churn in Clojure's source code came from Rich Hickey's A History of Clojure talk. To see those graphs, head over to the FoC website for the expanded version of these show notes. Some thoughts about wormholes. futureofcoding.org/episodes/059See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel
Today we're discussing the so-called "incommensurability" paper: The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel. In the pre-show, Jimmy demands that Ivan come right out and explain himself, and so he does, to a certain extent at least. In the post-show, Jimmy draws such a thick line between programming and philosophy that it wouldn't even look out of place on Groucho Marx's face. Next episode, we will be covering the Worse is Better family of thought products, so take 15 minutes to read these three absolute bangers if you'd like to be ahead of the game: The Rise of Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel Worse is Better is Worse, definitely not by Richard P. Gabriel Is Worse Really Better? by Richard P. Gabriel Links Phlogiston Theory Phlogiston the excellent chiptune musician. Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life, by Conor Oberst. Not to be confused with Conal Elliott, who introduced the original meaning of functional reactive programming in his work on Fran. Peter Gabriel - Games Without Frontiers Pilot: A Step Toward Man-Computer Symbiosis Jimmy's talk Paradigms Without Progress: Kuhnian Reflections on Programming Practice There's some sporadic discussion of Philip Wadler (who Ivan playfully calls "Phil"), specifically his claim that programming languages have some bits that are invented and some bits that are discovered. While we're here, make sure you've seen the best 15 seconds in Strange Loop history. Peter Naur's Programming as Theory Building Sponsors CarrotGrid — They don't have a web presence (weird, hey?) but they're working on an interesting problem at the intersection of data, so listen to the short ad in the episode to find out more. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital — Instead of running our usual sponsors today, we'd like to direct your attention to this humanitarian cause. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and our friends (can we call them that?) at Relay.fm are running a pledge drive. If you have any spare coins in your couch cushions, or a few million left over from your last exit, you'd be hard pressed to find a more deserving way to invest them. Donate here. Show notes for this episode can be found at futureofcoding.org/episodes/58See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg
There once was a podcast episode. It was about a very special kind of book: the Dynabook. The podcast didn't know whether to be silly, or serious. Jimmy offered some thoughtful reflections, and Ivan stung him on the nose. Sponsored by Replit.com, who want to give you some reasons not to join Replit, and Theatre.js, who want to make beautiful tools for animating the web with you. futureofcoding.org/episodes/57 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Augmenting Human Intellect by Doug Engelbart
symbol-manipulation.com collaboration.com thought-experiments.org behaviorism.com theatre.js system.org evolution.ca pithy.com replit.com summary.co.uk cringe.net futureofcoding.org programming.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklider
Jimmy Miller joins the show as co-host. Together, we embark on a new series of episodes covering the most influential and interesting papers in the history of our field. Some of these papers led directly to where we are today, and their influence cannot be overstated. Others were overlooked or unloved in their day, and we revive them out of curiosity and wonder. A few even hint at an inspiring future we haven't yet achieved, placing them squarely in line with our community's goals. We give these papers all the respect and deep reflection they deserve and, perhaps, the occasional kick in the shins. Today's paper is titled Man-Computer Symbiosis, authored by J.C.R. "Licky" Licklider in 1960. The title sure is outdated — but how have the ideas aged in the eternity since it was published? Listen on to hear your two hosts figure that out, and delight at just how wildly right and wrong some of its predictions turned out to be. Thank you to the following sponsors, all of whom are doing important work in our field, and all of whom want to hire you to do even more of it: Theatre.js — Enabling designers to code, programmers to design — empowering everyone to create. Glide — Anyone can make their own apps, with a GUI builder backed by a spreadsheet. Replit — An online REPL-driven dev environment with all the batteries you could ask for. (I keep hearing about more and more people in our sphere landing jobs at these co's — high-fives all around!) Show notes for this episode can be found at futureofcoding.org/episodes/55 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Ella Hoeppner: Vlojure
Today's guest is Ella Hoeppner, who first came onto the radar of our community back in the fall when she released a web-based visual Clojure editor called Vlojure, with a captivating introduction video. I was immediately interested in the project because of the visual style on display — source code represented as nested circles; an earthy brown instead of the usual dark/light theme. But as the video progressed, Ella showed off a scattering of little ideas that each seemed strikingly clever and obvious in hindsight. You'd drag one of the circle "forms" to the bottom right to evaluate it, or to the bottom left to delete it. The sides of the screen are flanked by "formbars" that hold, well, whatever you want. You can reconfigure these formbars to your exact liking. Everything is manipulated with drag. The interface exudes a sense that it was designed with wholly different goals and tastes than what we usually see in visual programming projects — perfect subject matter for our show. This episode was sponsored by Glide, and the transcript was sponsored by Replit — thanks to them both for making this possible. The show notes (with copious links) and transcript are available here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/054 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Scott Anderson: End-user Programming in VR
Scott Anderson has spent the better part of a decade working on end-user programming features for VR and the metaverse. He's worked on playful creation tools in the indie game Luna, scripting for Oculus Home and Horizon Worlds at Facebook, and a bunch of concepts for novel programming interfaces in virtual reality. Talking to Scott felt a little bit like peeking into what's coming around the bend for programming. For now, most of us do our programming work on a little 2D rectangle, with a clear split between the world around the computer and the one inside it. That might change — we may find ourselves inside a virtual environment where the code we write and the effects of running it happen in the space around us. We may find ourselves in that space with other people, also doing their own programming. This space might be designed, operated, and owned by a single megacorp with a specific profit motive. Scott takes us through these possibilities — how things are actually shaping up right now and how he feels about where they're going, having spent so much time exploring this space. This episode was sponsored by Glide, and the transcript was sponsored by Replit — thanks to them both for making this possible. The show notes (with copious links) and transcript are available here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/053 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Amjad Masad: Replit
The name Replit will be familiar to regular listeners of our show. The backstory and ambitions behind the project, however, I bet will be news to you. Amjad Masad, the founder and first programmer of Replit, is interviewed by Steve Krouse in this episode from the vault — recorded back in 2019, released for the first time today. Amjad shares the stories of how he taught himself to use a computer by secretly observing his father, his early experiments with Emscripten building VMs for the web, the founding of Replit, and how their community has exploded in popularity in recent years. Some of the conceptual discussions touch on Scheme, potential futures of visual programming, Sketchpad, and GRAIL. The transcript for this episode was sponsored, as ever, by Replit. The show notes and transcript are available right here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/052 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Toby Schachman: Cuttle, Apparatus, and Recursive Drawing
In this episode, I'll be talking to Toby Schachman, who many of you are surely familiar with thanks to an incredible string of projects he's released over the past decade, including Recursive Drawing back in 2012, Apparatus in 2015, and most recently Cuttle which opened to the public this past week. All of these projects superficially appear to be graphics editors, but by interacting with them you actually create a program that generates graphics. Their interfaces are wildly different from both traditional programming tools and traditional graphics apps. If you are not familiar with these projects, I strongly recommend that you actually go and play them (they all run in the browser), or watch the Strange Loop talk where Toby demos Apparatus and explains the thinking behind it. This episode was sponsored by Glide, and the transcript was sponsored by Replit — thanks to them both for making this possible. The show notes and transcript are available right here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/051 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mary Rose Cook: Isla & Code Lauren
Mary Rose Cook is a programmer with.. just.. so many side projects, oh my — and, she works at Airtable. Mary created Gitlet, a version of Git in 1000 lines of JavaScript with extensive annotation. That might be her most well-known project, but of particular interest to our community are her programming environments Isla and Code Lauren. These projects explore syntax, learnability, execution visualization, and other surfaces of the development experience that I think we all would love to see reinvented. Mary and I talk about the design decisions behind these projects, naturally. But more importantly, we look at the ways they failed to achieve the goals Mary had for them, and what we should all be mindful of on our investigations into the future of computing. The discussion also touches on the theme of "escape hatches", picks up a few lessons in UI design from the video games Into The Breach and The Witness, and reflects on what people think programming is like before they actually learn what it really is. Lighthearted but full of wisdom. We have a new sponsor for today's episode: Glide. If you're excited about making end-user software development a reality, go to glideapps.com/jobs and apply to join their team. As ever, the transcript for this episode is sponsored by Replit. The show notes and transcript are available right here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/050 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Ravi Chugh: Sketch-n-Sketch
Ravi Chugh is a (recently-tenured 🎉) prof at the University of Chicago. He’s famous for leading the Sketch-n-Sketch project, an output-directed, bidirectional programming tool that lets you seamlessly jump back and forth between coding and directly manipulating your program’s output. The tool gives you two different projected editing interfaces for the same underlying program, so that you can leverage the different strengths of each. In the interview we talk about the principles of bidirectional editing, the team and history behind the Sketch-n-Sketch project, benchmarks and values that can be used to assess these sorts of novel programming interfaces, possible future directions for Sketch-n-Sketch and the field more broadly, and a bunch more. It’s a long one — almost two and a half hours — but it’s packed with thought and charm. The transcript for this episode was sponsored by Repl.it. Show notes and the full transcript are available here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/049 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jennifer Jacobs: Para & Dynamic Brushes
"Metaphors are important here." There's a small handful of people that I've been requested again and again to interview on the Future of Coding podcast. Jennifer Jacobs is one of those people. Her work on Dynamic Brushes in particular, and parametric drawing in general, occupies a major intersection between disciplines and provides insights that we can all apply to our own work. This interview touches on childhood education, programming tools for both non-programmers and expert programmers, tangible interfaces, wearable and embodied computation, aesthetics, the relationship between academia and industry, means of evaluating the efficacy of projects, geometric encodings of first-order logic, symbolic representations, whether Scratch could exist outside MIT, and more. Jennifer does a wonderful job articulating the nature her own work, but also the works of her collaborators, peers, and influences, so that we come away with a great understanding for the broader spaces in which her research fits. Jennifer is already am important figure in our Future of Coding field, and I am very excited to follow her career and see all the places the impacts of her work will be felt. You'll notice right away that Steve is sitting in the interviewer chair this time. This is the first of a handful of episodes that Steve recorded in 2019 but didn't release. I'm planning to edit and release them throughout 2020, so you'll hear a bit more of Steve yet. The transcript for this episode was sponsored by Repl.it. Show notes and the full transcript are available here: https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/48 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Max/MSP & Pure Data: Miller Puckette
Miller Puckette created "The Patcher" Max (the precursor to Max/MSP), and later Pure Data, two of the most important tools in the history of visual programming and computer music. Max was designed by Miller in the mid-1980s as an aid to computer-music composers who wanted to build their own dynamic systems without needing write C code. Max had no facility for sound generation at first, but that would come eventually with the addition of MSP. A decade later, after some academic politics nonsense forced him away from Max, Miller went on to create its successor, the open source Pure Data. Both Max/MSP and Pure Data have become wildly popular, with Max/MSP as a more polished-looking commercial product developed by Cycling '74 (now owned by music behemoth Ableton), and Pure Data as the thriving independent community project of hackers and techno-punks. Node-and-wire visual programming languages are almost a cliche at this point, as the vast majority of them either borrow heavily or at least reference the visual design of Miller Puckette's original Max patcher and its MSP/Pd offspring. Though as you'll hear in the interview, many of them are poorer for not rethinking some of the underling assumptions of their inspiration. I decided to bring Miller on the show after hearing a fabulous interview of him by Darwin Grosse on the Art + Music + Technology podcast. (Tip: subscribe, it's good.) Miller gave a great retelling of the history of Max and Pure Data and the forces at play when he created them, and that episode is a tidy complement the more design-focussed interview here on our show. Miller mentioned in passing that one of the three books he has yet to write would be his thoughts on realtime scheduling, so that was the initial hook for my interview. Looking back on the 30+ years of Max/Pd history, what has he learned about the design of tools? What were the alternative ideas that he didn't pursue? Where is there room for improvement, perhaps by others picking up where he left off? In this interview, Miller said a handful of things that were, well, painful for me to hear as a dogmatic champion of visual programming. So if you come into this thinking it'll be a well-earned hour of congratulation and adoration, sit up and get ready to flip the dang table. This interview was a blast; on a personal level, I was thrilled to have the chance to talk to such an influential figure in the history of my field, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Quote of the Show: "It's not only powerful, but it's also inadequate." The transcript for this episode was sponsored by Repl.it. For the full transcript and links go to https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/047 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
2020 Community Survey
This was originally meant to be a little mini-episode halfway through March, with the next full episode coming at the start of April. Would you believe me if I told you that some things happened in the world that caused me to change my plans? Shocker, I know. Well, it's finally here. In today's episode, I'll reflect and commentate on the results of the first ever Future of Coding Community Survey. The show notes for this episode are full of graphs of the survey results, so be sure to take a look at that too. As ever, thanks to Repl.it for sponsoring those show notes. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.