A romp through the field of computer programming, grapling with our history and wondering what should come next. A mix of deeply technical talk, philosophy, art, dark lore, and good takes. Hosted by Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, and Lu Wilson.
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"Is the whole universe a computer?", ask Jack Copeland, Mark Sprevak, and Oron Shagrir in chapter 41 of the book The Turing Guide. They split this question in two, first asking whether the universe itself is a computer, then whether the universe could even be computed. These are lofty, unanswerable questions, sure, but they encroach on our territory — philosophy, automata, nonsense. So, in our usual reverent style and with attentive pacing, the three of us explore the paper, the questions, the answers they choose to highlight, and even share a few perfectly reasonable answers of our own.
Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning
Sunday, August 25, 2024 • Duration 02:44:27
Alexander Repenning created AgentSheets, an environment to help kids develop computational thinking skills. It wrapped an unusual computational model with an even more unusual user interface. The result was divisive. It inspired so many other projects, whilst being rejected at every turn and failing to catch on the way Scratch later did. So in 2017, Repenning published this obit of a paper, Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets, which covers his findings over the years as AgentSheets evolved and transformed, and gives perspective on block-based programming, programming-by-example, agents / rule / rewrite systems, automata, and more.
This is probably the most "normal" episode we've done in a while — we stay close to the text and un-clam many a thought-tickling pearl. I'm saying that sincerely now to throw you off our scent the next time we get totally lost in the weeds. I hear a clock ticking.
Links
$ Do you want to move beyond syntax? Frustrated by a lack of syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic support? Join our Patreon! Choose the tier that best reflects your personal vision of the future of coding. Get (frequently unhinged) monthly bonus content. Most of all: let us know that you enjoy this thing we do, and help us keep doing it for years to come.
Argos, for our non-UK listeners. They were acquired by future TodePond sponsor, Sainsbury's.
Once again, I am asking for your Marcel Goethals makes a lot of cool weird stuff and is a choice follow.
Scratch isn't baby programming. Also, you should try Ivan programmed in 3 blocks of Scratch.
INTERCAL by Donald Woods & James Lyon
Thursday, June 1, 2023 • Duration 01:54:14
This is a normal episode of a podcast called Future of Coding. We talk about INTERCAL, a real tool for computer programming. [Do I need to say more? Will this sell it? Most people won’t have heard of INTERCAL, but I think the fake out “normal” is enough to draw their attention. Also, I find “computer programming” funny. Not sure why I put that in quotes.]
Links [at least, the ones I remembered to jot down]
The final Strange Loop is coming up this September. Ivan and Jimmy will both be there, though—late breaking news—neither of them will be giving a talk. (“Rocket Rules” apply, if you know what that is.) [Will anyone actually know what “Rocket Rules” is? Will they search for it? That would be sort of embarrassing for me.]
If Ivan were to give a programming talk, getting some flood-contaminated gear from DEC or a PDP-11 to use as staging / set dressing might be a challenge. [Yay, another retread of my personal history. Maybe instead of dredging up my past I should be the sort of person who makes new things, like, ever.]
Meowmeowbeenz [Gah this show hasn’t aged well. At least I’m sticking to the whole “high-brow + low-brow” personal identity by including the reference to it. [Is “meta” low-brow at this point?]]
There’s lots of talk about esolangs (esoteric programming languages), so it’s worth linking the Esolang Wiki. [I worry that we spent too much time focusing on surface syntax. Jimmy tried to get us to talk about the beautifully-weird semantics within INTERCAL, but we never fully went there. I’m sure some people will complain about this lack of depth. Not looking forward to that.]
Out of the Tar Pit by Ben Moseley & Peter Marks
Saturday, April 1, 2023 • Duration 02:19:46
Out of the Tar Pit is in the grand pantheon of great papers, beloved the world over, with just so much influence. The resurgence of Functional Programming over the past decade owes its very existence to the Tar Pit’s snarling takedown of mutable state, championed by Hickey & The Cloj-Co. Many a budding computational philosophizer — both of yours truly counted among them — have been led onward to the late great Bro86 by this paper’s borrow of his essence and accident. But is the paper actually good? Like, really — is it that good? Does it hold up to the blinding light of hindsight that 2023 offers? Is this episode actually an April Fools joke, or is it a serious episode that Ivan just delayed by a few weeks because of life circumstances and his own incoherent sense of humour? I can’t tell.
Apologies in advance. Next time, we’re going back to our usual format to discuss Intercal.
Links
Before anything else, we need to link to Simple Made Easy. If you don’t know, now you know! It’s a talk by Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) that, as best as I can tell, widely popularized discussion of simplicity and complexity in programming, using Hickey’s own definitions that built upon the Tar Pit paper. Ignited by this talk, with flames fanned by a few others, as functional programming flared in popularity through the 2010s, the words “simple”, “easy”, “complex”, and “reason about” became absolutely raging memes.
We also frequently reference Fred Brooks and his No Silver Bullet. Our previous episode has you covered.
No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks
Saturday, February 11, 2023 • Duration 03:00:17
Jimmy and I have each read this paper a handful of times, and each time our impressions have flip-flopped between "hate it so much" and "damn that's good". There really are two sides to this one. Two reads, both fair, both worth discussing: one of them within "the frame", and one of them outside "the frame". So given that larger-than-normal surface for discursive traversal, it's no surprise that this episode is, just, like, intimidatingly long. This one is so, so long, friends. See these withered muscles and pale skin? That's how much time I spent in Ableton Live this month. I just want to see my family.
No matter how you feel about Brooks, our thorough deconstruction down to the nuts and bolts of this seminal classic will leave you holding a ziplock bag full of cool air and wondering to yourself, "Wait, this is philosophy? And this is the future we were promised? Well, I guess I'd better go program a computer now before it's too late and I never exist."
Sorry, it's late and I'm sick, and I have to write something, you know?
Links:
Fred Brooks also wrote the Mythical Man-Month, which we considered also discussing on this episode but thank goodness we didn't.
Also, Fred Brooks passed away recently. We didn't mention it on the show, but it's worth remarking upon. RIP, and thanks for fighting the good fight, Fred. I still think you're wrong about spatial programming, but Jimmy agrees with you, so you can probably rest easy since between the two of us he's definitely the more in touch with the meaning of life.
This is Jimmy’s favourite paper! Here’s a copy someone posted on HitBug. Is it as good as the original? Likely not! Ivan also enjoyed this Theory Building business immensely; don’t be fooled by the liberal use of the “blonk” censor-tone to cover the galleon-hold of swearwords he let slip, those mostly pertain to the Ryle.
For the next episode, we’re reading No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks.
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 by 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:
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.
Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel
Sunday, October 30, 2022 • Duration 01:13:16
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:
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.
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".
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:
Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg
Monday, July 18, 2022 • Duration 02:45:03
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.
Rewrite rules are one example of rewriting in computing.
Lu's talk —and I quote— "at Cellpond", was actually at SPLASH, about Cellpond, and it's a good talk, about —and I quote— "actually, what if they didn't give up on rewrite rules at this point in history and what if they went further?"
Oh yeah — Cellpond is cool. Here's a video showing you how it works. And here's a video studying how that video works. And here's a secret third thingthat bends into a half-dimension.
I don't need to link to SimCity, right? You all know SimCity? Will Wright is, arguably, the #1 name in simulation games. Well, you might not have caught the fantastic article Model Metropolis that unpacks the (inadvertently?) libertarian ideology embodied within the design of its systems. I'd also be remiss not to link to Polygon's video (and the corresponding write-up), which lend a little more colour to the history.
Couldn't find a good link to Blox Pascal, which appears in the paper Towards "Second Generation" Interactive, Graphical Programming Environments by Ephraim P. Glinert, which I also couldn't find a good link to.
Amit Patel's Red Blob Games, fantastic (fantastic!) explorable explanations that help you study various algorithms and techniques used in game development.
University of Colorado Boulder has a collection of simulations called PhET. They're… mid, at least when compared to building your own simulation. For instance.
In particular, Brainfuck, which Jimmy adorably refers to as “BF” because he’s a polite gentleman and Ivan is 2% South Park. [Laughing at my own joke.]
Also, Shakespeare and Shakespeare: vaulting ambition, Out, damned spot, both from the Scottish play (you don’t know where I am, don’t @ me). [Why are these in the show notes? Am I trying to signal some sort of theatre-literacy? Who cares?]
“COMEFROM was eventually implemented in the C-INTERCAL variant of the esoteric programming language INTERCAL” [Considering that this was such a non-element in the original paper, it’s weird that it became such a cornerstone of the episode. “What if we recreated the spirit of the paper in the podcast itself” is a tall order, so I guess we did what we could with what we had. Also, I bet someone is going to object that the paper and language aren’t actually very meta, especially not multiple layers deep, to which I’ll reply: we all bring the flavour of our mouth to the soup we taste.]
Exapunks… Yeah! [Speaking of things that haven’t aged well… woof. I like our newer episodes better. Especially this one. THAT’S JUST BAIT FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WILL COMPLAIN THAT THIS SHOW HAS GONE OFF THE RAILS, PLEASE DO CONTINUE TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW.]
Our tier list was created in tldraw, because it’s the best. [I wish someone applied Steve-and-co’s eye for detail to a visual programming tool. I wish I had time.]
The excellent Advent of Computing podcast did an episode on INTERCAL. (Aside: the AoC website seems a bit busted in non-Chrome browsers, so here’s a backup YouTube link, but you can also just search for Advent of Computing in your podcast player of choice.) [AoC is the exception that proves the rule: there are no high-quality programming podcasts. They all seem so low-effort, made by people who don’t respect the listener’s time and attention. Or they’re aping the high-budget NPR style, with no personality. Also, audio quality is all over the map. Also, just the worst garbage ads and theme music, all of them! I wonder if it’s just a cost-benefit time/energy tradeoff, or maybe people don’t know how to do better? I wonder what we could do to help raise the bar, without opening ourselves up to a bunch of “well I don’t like your podcast either” presumed competitiveness.]
The video Screens in Screens in Screens is fantastic, and the sort of thing that deserves our support. Also, Lu Wilson (the human behind TodePond) has their own programming language that will not be named on podcasts, DreamBerd, which uses the ! to great effect. [Meta-commentary intentionally left blank.]
Some of the music featured in this episode:
All Caps by MF DOOM and Madlib [I don’t even like it when other podcasts include music clips, but then away I go needle-dropping like I’ve got something to prove.]
Various songs from Ivan’s old albums. [I need to update my website. I need to tweak my static site generator. I need to redesign all the CSS. I need to consider putting all my projects into a database so I can generate nicer indexes. I also need to make some new projects — especially music.]
Get in touch, ask us questions, send us the sound of your knuckles cracking:
Ivan: Mastodon • Email [If you don’t have something nice to say, know that I’m very sensitive and nurse wounds for a long time. Also, Nurse With Wound is great.]
Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter [Jimmy doesn’t write these notes so I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I can imagine: a horse galloping in the wind, Jimmy riding shirtless on the horse, Jimmy holding a gigantic tome of philosophical wisdom in one hand, the other outstretched before him, words of revelation flowing from his mouth like honey, “Ivan, the setup to this joke was lame”]
“Some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and state.” — Guy Steele
FoC Challenge: Brooks claimed 4 evils lay at the heart of programming — Complexity, Conformity, Changeability, and Invisibility. Could you design a programming that had a different set of four evils at the heart of it? (Bonus: one of which could encompass the others and become the ur-evil)
The paper introduces something called Functional Relational Programming, abbreviated FRP. Note well, and do not be confused, that there is a much more important and common term that also abbreviates to FRP: Family Resource Program. Slightly less common, but yet more important and relevant to our interests as computer scientists, is the Fluorescence Recovery Protein in cyanobacteria. Less abundant, but again more relevant, is Fantasy Role-Playing, a technology with which we’ve all surely developed a high degree of expertise. For fans of international standards, see ISO 639-3 — the Franco-Provençal language, represented by language code frp. As we approach the finality of this paragraph, I’ll crucially point out that “FRP”, when spoken aloud all at once at though it were a word, sounds quite like the word frp, which isn’t actually a word — you’ve fallen right into my trap. Least importantly of all, and also most obscurely, and with only minor interest or relevance to listeners of the podcast and readers of this paragraph, we have the Functional Reactive Programming paradigm originally coined by Conor Oberst and then coopted by rapscallions who waste time down by the pier playing marbles.
FoC Challenge: Can you come up with a programming where informal reasoning doesn’t help? Where you are lost, you are without hope, and you need to get some kind of help other than reasoning to get through it?
FoC Challenge: Can you come up with a kind of testing where using a particular set of inputs does tell you something about the system/component when it is given a different set of inputs?
It was notEpimenides who said “You can’t dip your little toesies into the same stream” two times — presumably because he only said it once.
Zig has a nicely explicit approach to memory allocation.
FoC Challenge: A programming where more things are explicit — building on the example of Zig’s explicit allocators.
One of Ivan’s favourite musical acts of the 00s is the ever-shapeshifting Animal Collective — of course 🙄. If you’ve never heard of them, the best album to start with is probably the avant-pop Feels, though their near-breakthrough was the loop-centric Merriweather Post Pavilion, and Ivan’s personal favourite is, as of this writing, the tender psychedelic folk of Prospect Hummer.
Jimmy’s Aphantasia motivates some of his desire for FoC tools.
Don’t miss the previous episode on Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building, since Ivan references it whilst digging his own grave.
Jimmy uses Muse for his notes, so he can highlight important things in two colors — yes, two colors at the same time. Living in the future.
For the Shadow of the Colossus link, here’s an incredible speedrun of the game. Skip to 10:20-ish for a great programming is like standing on the shoulders of a trembling giant moment.
Mu is a project by Kartik Agaram, in which he strips computing down to the studs and rebuilds it with a more intentional design. “Running the code you want to run, and nothing else.”
Here’s just one example of the racist, sexist results that current AI tools produce when you train them on the internet. Garbage in, garbage out — a real tar pit. AI tools aren’t for deciding what to say; at best, they’ll help with how to say it.
Gray Crawford is one of the first people I saw posting ML prompts what feels like an eternity ago, back when the results all looked like blurry goop but like… blurry goop with potential.
Not sure of a good link for Jimmy’s reference that Age of Empires II used expert systems for the AI, but here’s a video that talks about the AI in the game and even shows some Lisp code.
Idris is a language that has a bit of an “automatic programming” feel.
When people started putting massive numbers of transistors into a single chip (eg: CPU, RAM, etc) they called that process Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). Also, remember that scene in the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire when the hunky Steve Jobs-looking guy said "VLSI" to impress the girl from the only good episode of Black Mirror? I'm still cringing.
Sally Haslanger is a modern day philosopher and feminist who works with accident and essence despite their problematic past.
Music featured in this episode:
Never, a song I wrote and recorded on Tuesday after finally cleaning my disgusting wind organ. It was like Hollow Knight in there.
Get in touch, ask us questions, send us old family recipes:
Hey listener! Send us questions so we can answer them on the show. Like, “How do you turn your worms?” Or, “What’s so great about prepromorphisms anyway?” We’ll answer them, honest! Send them here:
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.
#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.
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:
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.
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