gisborne

Flutter builds pretty decent desktop apps these days.

Relevant analysis: https://guyren.me/2025/04/16/programming-in-the-age-of-abund...

I would develop a production-ready Datalog database system.

I am convinced a better alternative to the execrable SQL would significantly raise developer productivity.

http://frest.substack.com

If you are asking for the most general-purpose technology around right now, I would say Dart/Flutter.

Dart is a half-decent language, able to be used without excessive pain for mobile, desktop, web and backend development. It compiles to Javascript and WASM, as well as native code. And web can be either traditional HTML or a recreation of your mobile/desktop UI.

It’s a really healthy community with strong leadership and wide participation.

You’ll need SQL, but otherwise, you can build any kind of app with Dart and Flutter with reasonably fluidity.

At some point, I need to dig into how good a general UI environment I get with Godot. There appears to be something at least usable there.

I significantly prefer the Mac user experience over Windows (it’s bad, but Windows is abominable).

Still, I use Electron apps that UI-wise are fine. Well-known examples include Discord and Slack. They’re big and a bit slow, but they’re fine and I appreciate the uniform user experience when I use those apps on other platforms.

Flutter is just better, provides something close to a native experience, and slick experiences at that (really slick animation is easy) while being an efficient cross-platform development solution (for mobile, also).

But electron etc are a fine choice. The heft of the Javascript ecosystem, if nothing else, is a serious consideration.

If you really are doing this for yourself, Flutter has the best development efficiency and you can use animations and such pretty easily to make a slick product.

But no-one hires Flutter developers at least in the US and Canada. It’s pretty popular in India and China and some other parts, but you’ll struggle if you want to find work doing this, or if you try to hire someone to do it (although the latter wouldn’t be terrible, and you’d be hiring someone who’s choosing a tool for its virtues, not just its market share).

If those considerations bother you, then Electron or something lighter weight like Gluon or Electrino.

The other major alternative is React Native. You should look at that also.

But if this is really just you, Flutter, no contest. Desktop, mobile and even web (although it is not ideal for just a web app, but it would let you offer a web version with minimal extra affort, and it’s improving in this area rapidly).

https://frest.substack.com

I am working on better APIs driven by a better user interface experience.

The better APIs are REST but relational. The better UIs are driven by an embeddable component-based view of the API and its data.

The result is plastic software that out of the box more resembles Access or FileMaker than Ruby on Rails.

No.

There is a particular logic (“Classical Logic”) that people are usually thinking of when they mention logic. Many folks don’t know that there are many, many logics that have been invented by mathematicians and philosophers, and an infinity of possible logics. All are as mathematically sound as each other. They vary in how truth behaves (SQL’s true-false-null is a poor attempt at a 3-valued logic, for example; or you might include notions like necessity and possibility or time).

Fuzzy logic is another logic. It’s quite precise about how truth behaves, and truth is a real number on the range [0, 1]. And it does a nice job of providing a notion of partial truth.

Computer programs needn’t be Turing Complete. There are plenty of useful languages that are not, the Relational Algebra being example 1, which is equivalent to First Order Logic, and is in a pretty strong sense about as good as you can do without Turing Completeness.

The entire industry’s understanding of the power of the relational model has been destroyed by SQL, which is the largest foot gun of so many in our industry.

In fact, much more of most business applications (hell, just about all applications) can and would profitably be expressable in First Order Logic. The resulting programs would be simpler, easier to modify, easier to get correct, and other things besides.

Much of what Bret Victor has shown could be expressed in First Order Logic.

Would you still want Turing Complete traditional programming languages? Of course. But both programmers and non-programmers would benefit from being able to express more of programs using the sorts of declarative idioms that Bret Victor has shown and that the relational model provides.

I’m puzzled why you equate “default state” with “nothing active”. If the default should be that thing the button says is on, then have the button default to being in the active state.

The language even for discussing this is tiring to read…

Programmable APIs.

A HTTP request is a function call with named arguments. What if the server had some endpoints that provide basic fp (map, fold, curry, …), and you let your users create their own endpoints by currying together other endpoints?

I would be very interested. How can I get in touch?

This is probably completely wrong. It is looking like fusion power will arrive sooner than most people realize.

This will make energy virtually free, which will change _everything_. Think heating the open air downtowns of cities, for example, even in quite cold and snowy areas.

Is is cheap and easy to produce clean water, given abundant energy.

This is true, but it’s not the only truth that matters.

Public goods can be _very_ efficient, even if inefficient in their delivery. I would have trouble believing that an educated citizenry is not a good thing, for example.

So although taxes are evil, they can be outweighed by a _much_ greater good.

But, also, wasted public spending is a great tragedy.

From this, I arrive at a left-Libertarian point of view: we should limit what the government does as well as we can to those things that are clearly better than the evil of the taxes involved, while it is still I think true that social welfare is compatible with this view.

I reject this.

I’ve given my two kids, now older teens, pretty much free reign to watch what they want and use the Internet as they want.

I was certainly gifted with nice and precocious kids, but still: they both really like watching educational videos. They spend hours every day doing that. The quality and number of these videos is now utterly amazing.

They both have a much greater level of general knowledge than I did at their age. They have a much wider set of interests, a greater awareness of possibilities and opportunities, and correspondingly greater opportunities than I ever did, too.

You obviously haven’t read Dune.

Location: San Diego CA

Remote: preferred

Relocate: no

Technologies: SQL particularly Postgres; logic/ontology;

Ruby/Rails; writing/speaking/teaching

Resume: linkedin.com/in/guyren

Email: guyren@relevantlogic.com

Computing tools for non—programmers.

In the early days of computing, we quickly came up with the spreadsheet and the user-friendly relational database (Access, FileMaker).

Then we just sort of stopped. The no-code thing today is a step in that direction, but we could do so much better.

I’m actually ashamed of the software industry that we have done so poorly at this.

Spivak’s Calculus is the best-written textbook I’ve ever encountered and one of the more beautiful examples of book design also.

Most of the problems described in other posts concern trying to convert text programming paradigms into a visual representation.

Let me suggest two ways visual programming might be a big part of the future:

1. New paradigms, such as constraint based programming, might well lend themselves better to a visual presentation; and 2. VR. Visual programming is indeed much less visually dense than text, but if you start over with the assumption you’re doing it in VR, that suddenly is if anything a virtue.

Imagine something that was part Excel, part Access, with visual, animated 3D representations of other major programming abstractions also, and you start to see that VP might really be the future.

Dune (and the sequels through God Emperor).

I’ve never found a writer who could discuss humanity writ large — both in masses, and over enormous spans of time — like Herbert. Dune is the easy to read, fast moving approachable yarn that gets you in. The real masterpiece is God Emperor, where we get to see humanity over thousands of years, and we really learn Herbert’s most important lesson: beware the charismatic dictator.

Twitter.

I was in an Austin Ruby meetup when these guys came in who had a music startup (this was when everyone and his dog had a music startup). They were hiring for the startup, and they presented this side project they had. They described it as "basically your myspace status, only that's all there is".

Thought the music startup was dumb and Twitter made it look smart. They were hiring. I could have been a really early hire…

Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, is now a critic of many of their policies. Stewart Brand is another critic.

Much of what they do is good, but it's clearly not driven by a cold and careful evaluation of the actual consequences of human behaviors, but by emotion.

Far too many people are confusing problems with SQL with problems with the relational model.

SQL != relational database

I smell sock puppet.

http://subtextual.org