jonathanedwards

I thought a benefit of ES module was allowing cyclic dependencies, but I'm not reading any discussion of that.

Just poor writing. I've talked more about this on my blog. Open source usually only works for tools for hackers. I want to reach the rest of humanity.

Yeah, I've gotten a lot of pushback on that. One approach I've seen is to reject expressions that would violate standard precedence, and require extra parentheses.

Strong agree. The syntax in this work was meant to be mostly hidden from the end user. I've found that syntax is still really useful for language design and implementation. I stopped before building the graphical programming environment on top.

Interesting. Check out the futureofcoding.org slack. There are some workshops that take early stage ideas, like LIVE and PX. Keep working on your ideas and try to pull them together into a coherent explanation. I'd be happy to take a look and give you some feedback.

Well said. You know, sometime soon I need to make a stand. My gut check was that this wasn't the hill I'm willing to die on.

Yeah that didn't happen. I stopped this work before I got to reimplementing the UI. I worked out some problems I've been obsessing about forever, but the result is just too complex and alien. Back to the drawing board. Thanks for your encouragement all these years.

Thanks yeah it's got a long way to go.

Please take this as Computer Science Fiction

And then should "live programming", where the program is running while edited, become "gramming"?

How did I miss this? Thank you!

As a geezer with glasses, I find my laptop screen works better than a monitor. The laptop screen is down in the reading zone of my progressive lenses, yet I can still look up out the window. A big monitor requires me to use glasses without any distance vision, making me feel like I'm trapped in a fishbowl.

I also love the fact that my window layout is exactly the same whether I am working at my desk or a coffeeshop. Or at least when I used to work at coffeeshops...

We are organizing a workshop using Illich's concept of conviviality to discuss the future of software. https://2020.programming-conference.org/home/salon-2020#Call...

The scariest thing about this article is it didn't contain the word "bubble"

Yeah, the dates are an approximation of when it was developed, but many screenshots come from much later, especially for pre-web tools.

I actually have an old Genera manual, and added some figures from it: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE...

Bit of a puff piece. For a contrasting view, Dan Lyons (Fake Steve Jobs) has some choice quotes on Benioff excerpted here http://www.platformonomics.com/2016/09/the-spectacle-that-is... “There’s an art to this kind of horseshit, and Benioff is its Michelangelo.”

Hi Robert! I thought (perhaps incorrectly) that Lively was largely the same programming experience as Squeak, just in the browser. Do you have any screenshots showing new programming experiences in lively.next or cloxp?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RPX_9u01MEU-QDWU4h-90QF9XqZ...

As requested, here is a PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RPX_9u01MEU-QDWU4h-90QF9XqZ...

I think I moved the speaker notes into the body of the slides, but the doc is so swamped I can't get in to see! Perhaps I dropped some in the process. I'll look into it. If you can remember anything in particular that is missing please let me know.

Mindstorms was pretty much a variant of Scratch. Never heard of Klik&Play - I'll check it out, thanks.

Correct, that's the slideshow version. Let me know if that isn't working and I'll post a PDF snapshot

Having this conversation on HN risks bias. Most of us have been selected for our cognitive skills. Regular people have a terrible time learning programming. See https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/224105-learning-compute... I suspect that programming is so hard not because it is necessarily so, but because it has been developed by people like us for people like us, who can tolerate or even enjoy massive complexity.

This. There is little funding for the kind of research that will lead us out of the tarpit (and less with the demise of HARC). My hat is off to Eve's investors for being unusually far-thinking for SV. But ultimately this is the responsibility of our research institutions, which unfortunately have other priorities.

We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.

Author here. This doc is just my personal curation of notable/interesting UIs for programming, as inspiration for my own research. Not attempting to be comprehensive, and being somewhat opinionated on the level of generality required to be called "programming". Thanks for all the links, I'll check them out.

Author here. If you can't access the Google Doc I put up a slideshow here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE... Missing the links in the speaker notes though, so I'll come up with a better solution.

Yeah - same story repeated decade after decade. "Build apps without coding" is one of those Siren ideas - it seems so compelling and necessary, yet everyone ends up using much the same design as has failed countless times before. I don't really understand exactly why this is so, but I'm pretty sure we need to figure that out to make progress.

My theory is that it is not the existence of a wall that limits these tools - it is the invisibility of the wall. Spreadsheets have a wall too, but it is pretty clear to naive users where it is. These app-in-a-can tools hit the wall suddenly and unpredictably - you need a new UI feature, or the data model can't be generalized, or you can't connect to some silo. Perhaps a better metaphor than a wall would be a mine field.