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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Reflection 14: /about
If you haven’t been following my research journey, this episode is a great place to join! I recap of who I am, where I come from, what I’m trying to accomplish, and how I hope to accomplish it. The mission of this project is, broadly, to “democratize” programming. My new phrase is: Enable all people to modify they software they use in the course of using it. This mission would cause the following changes, in order of increasing importance: All software will be co-created by decentralized communities, rather than centralized groups or companies. Through the power of crowd-sourcing, the quality of all software will become much higher than existing software. All software will be much more composible, interoperable with other pieces of software. All software will be arbitrarily customizable, allowing for bespoke, tailored experiences. Learning to communicate with computers teaches one how to think more clearly, precisely, mathmatically, and powerfully. If one can manipulate the software one uses, if only one learns how to organize one’s thoughts, many people will self-teach themselvse to do just that. As the fabric of the world is eaten by software, the ability to fully manipulate that software one uses is an essential freedom. This vision is not new nor creative: it’s obvious that people would change things if they could. Yet this problem has proven stubborn over the decades and most have given it up as insoluble. We have all but forgotten the essential characteristic of computers: their malleability. In order to accomplish this vision, I believe there are three large categories of problems that need to be addressed: Rid ourselves of the IO Monad, replacing it with better abstractions for whole systems. Create a better programming experience for the complex abstractions we create to avoid IO. Reimagine version control for a world where software looks very different than it does today, with many more forks, at many more levels than just one-deep off of master My recent work was on ridding ourselves of the IO Monad from user interfaces, which is building on Conal Elliot’s FRP work. My paper and talk at REBLS last month argues that Elm Architecture makes software take longer to understand (which is untenable if we want people to be able to modify the software they use in the course of using it) as compared to the higher-order and cyclic streams of Conal’s original FRP. My future work will be improving the programming experience of “original FRP”, potentially with a Haskell-inspired structured editor. I will also extend Conal’s FRP work to also removing the IO Monad from the “backend”. In the episode I add a lot more color to these points, as well as discuss my personal background, the past and future of Future of Coding meetups, my experience at SPLASH last month, and other whacky ideas! You can see the transcript for this episode at https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/33. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Basic Developer Human Rights: Quinn Slack
Quinn Slack of Sourcegraph believes in low-hanging fruit. Before we improve programming in all the fancy ways, he has a list of all the little improvements and features we need to make available to all developers, such as jump-to-definition, autocomplete, and automatic formatting. In this conversation, we learn about the technical challenges to brining code intelligence to all editors, and Sourcegraph's chosen solutions, such as the Langauge Server Protocol and the Sourcegraph extension API. Quinn explains how Sourcegraph code search is so effective without resorting to any fancy machine learning. We also discuss the trade-offs of open-sourcing a devtools company from Day 1, how to find like-minded investors, and how to "win the hearts and minds of developers." Notes and transcript at futureofcoding.org/episodes/32 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sustaining the Underfunded: Nadia Eghbal
Two years ago, Nadia Eghbal "stumbled onto the internet's biggest blindspot": sustainability of open-source. Her Ford Foundation report "Roads and Bridges" became an instant classic. She shined a light on the underappreciated roles of maintainers and how difficult it was for even vital projects to get enough funding for a single person full time. In this conversation, we discuss how she found "stumbled onto" this problem initially, and her road from the Ford Foundation to GitHub and now Protocol Labs. We discuss the challenges of indepdendent research and remote work... and how being able to find amazing friends and co-conspirators on Twitter somehow makes it all better. Nadia lays out her vision for the future of open source, and how we can tackle the human side of scaling open-source development. She also gives us a sneak preview of her current work on a new economic model for understanding how open-source software consumption scales. It doesn't scale costlessly, because "you have to make continual changes to it, either because people are submitting changes back to it, but also because software degrades over time. Knowledge degrades over time. You can't just release something once and be done with it." Notes and transcript at futureofcoding.org/episodes/31 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On The Maintenance Of Large Software: James Koppel
How do we maintain millions of lines of code? For example, the Social Security Administration has 60-million-lines of COBOL. James Koppel is building tools to help tame these kinds of beasts. His current work is on decreasing the costs to build developer tools by allowing the same tool to work on a variety of languages. James Koppel is a Carnegie Mellon CS grad, Thiel Fellow, entrepreneur, educator, and currently PhD student at MIT. We talk about his experience withprogram repair, program sythesis, code comprehension, and many other cutting-edge fields relevant to the future of software engineering. Transcript and episode notes: futureofcoding.org/episodes/30 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Reflection Thirteen - Independent mentorship
My research recap episodes are back! This is the first I've recorded since the end of 2017. I discuss my new mentor-mentee relationship with Jonathan Edwards, my upcoming new paper on functional reactive programming, my move to London, my longer-term goals, and other various musings about abstractions, monads, and data ninja playgrounds. futureofcoding.org/reflections/13 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Exploring Dynamicland - Omar Rizwan
Many of you have heard about Dynamicland, Bret Victor's new project. Omar Rizwan comes on the podcast this week to tell us all about it. He recently wrote an amazing write up about it, [Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit](https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/), that I'd highly reccomend to everyone interested in the future of computing. futureofcoding.org/episodes/28 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Bringing Explicit Modeling To The Web: David K Piano
David K Piano is bringing explicit software modeling to the web with his xstate library. He gives talks around the world about statecharts, and is cooking up a new SaaS service that will help developers model and understand their application using statecharts. In this conversation, David and I discuss the benefits of declarative languages, such as CSS, the principle of least power, musical notation, and Facebook Origami. futureofcoding.org/episodes/27 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Compassion & Programming: Glen Chiacchieri
Glen Chiacchieri has worked at the MIT Media Lab on Scratch, at Dynamicland with Bret Victor, and is now becoming a psychotherapist. He's known for his Legible Mathematics essay, his Flowsheets programming prototypes, and the Laser Socks game, among many other projects. In this conversation, we discuss: how he grounds his research in compassion, the tradeoffs between working on the "model vs UI" of programming, his software-company-in-the-making, based on Flowsheets, our shared dream for the future of open-source READMEs, and how Dynamicland does and does not point towards the future. The notes for this conversation can be found at futureofcoding.org/episodes/26. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You Should Consider Some States Kevin Lynagh
Kevin Lynagh is a designer specializing in user interfaces for complex systems. He co-created Subform, a CAD-inspired UI design tool, with Ryan Lucas, which got a thousand backers on Kickstarter. He recently created Sketch.systems, an interactive playground for designing system behavior using Statecharts (hierarchical state machines). In this conversation, we discuss direct manipulation, Statecharts, challenges of layout engines, visual programming languages, the Clojure community, constraint systems, and the three different types of programmers. futureofcoding.org/episodes/25 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Stop Being A Sysadmin For Your Own Machine: Nick Santos
Do you hate Makefiles and YAML config files? Do you feel your soul slowly dying as you wait for your tests to run? Do you yearn for even-more-continuous integration? Nick Santos, the CTO and founder of Windmill Engineering, is here to help. Windmill's a cloud-based build-system that intelligently runs your relevant tests in the cloud, in parallel on every file save. How's that for a tight feedback loop? futureofcoding.org/episodes/24 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Teaching Abstraction: Brent Yorgey
Brent Yorgey is a professor of math and CS at Hendrix College. He studys functional programming in Haskell, type systems, and category theory, and more. He is the creator of the diagrams vector graphics Haskell library. He taught Introduction to Haskell and The Art of Recursion at the University of Pennslyvaia (which were my two favorite classes in college!). In this conversation, we talk about Brent’s Monad Tutorial Fallacy essay, type systems, FRP, essential vs accidental complexity in Haskell, and the perils of reading academic CS papers and ways to overcome them. http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/23 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Learning Programming At Scale: Philip Guo
Philip Guo researches ways to scale programming education beyond the classroom. He is the creator of Python Tutor (http://pythontutor.com/), a widely-used code visualization and collaborative learning platform, and an assistant professor at UC San Diego. In this episode, we discuss why diverse groups of people study CS, his various prototypes, and the differences between technological research and industry. http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/22 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Building for Developers: Aidan Cunniffe
My guest this week, Aidan Cuniffee, is the founder of two startups in this space, first Dropsource and now Optic. Aidan and I discuss the trade-offs between creating tools for developers vs non-programmers. We also get to hear some of the upcomming features to expect from Optic. We finish off the interview with a fun theoretical discussion of notation, representation, conciseness and learnability. http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/21 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Coding On (the) Beach: Jason Brennan
Jason Brennan is a Canadian computer scientist focused on education and computing. He’s worked at Hopscotch and Khan Academy. We discussed his experiences building multiple programming language platforms, the incomprehensibly large vision of Alan Kay, and his new project Beach. http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/20 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Building Universe: Joe Cohen
Like many of us, Joe Cohen fell in love with HyperCard. Three years ago, he founded Universe to re-imagine HyperCard for the modern day. In this interview, Joe walks us through his initial vision for Universe, and the pivots along the way. It's a refreshing story about balancing pie-in-the-sky vision with shorter-term customer needs. You can find the demo videos that Joe references here: http://futureofcoding.org/19-building-universe-joe-cohen.html Most importantly, you can download Universe for iPhone here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/universe-build-a-website/id1211437633 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.