Future of Coding Weekly 2020/01 Week 3

Welcome! we are slightly over 150 members, let's try the 200 goal for next month :)

This time I introduced some simple separators between entries so it's clear where something ends and the next thing starts, let me know what you think.

Demos

Edward de Jong posted a new example showing the physical units of measurement feature in the Beads language, which tracks units at runtime (by storing the exponents of the component physical unit terms along with the value). A few languages have included physical units, but it is extremely rare to track the units at runtime.

For the heat transfer app, see https://github.com/magicmouse/beads-examples, for the SDK go to beadslang.com, for more information check beadslang.org (which is different from the previous one)

(Slack Conversation)

--

Mariano Guerra shared a demo: No Code Data Science Update: Drag & Drop Basket, Workspaces and Search (Slack Conversation)

Easier drag & drop of one or more items across long distances or across screens with the basket.

Workspaces can be created to work on different tasks and search used to navigate between them.

From our Community

Kartik Agaram Shared a really detailed spreadsheet: Future of Coding or Programming: Project Comparison

--

westoncb author of Lucidity introduced himself and presented another project: a slightly better known structure editor project called Tiled Text. (Slack Conversation)

--

nagle wrote a blog-post version of a paper submitted to PPIG (Psychology of Programming 2019) How Coda helps people overcome technology freeze

(Slack Conversation)

I'm sketching out a way to connect recent nervous system breakthroughs to programmable UI design, taking inspiration from how cognitive science breakthroughs anchored original UI design for the Alto.

Paper: Winter is Coding: On Programming & The Freeze Response

--

Michael Dubakov shared The 'No Code' Delusion (Slack Conversation)

Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this, and I think some of the “no code” tools are great. But I also thing it’s wrong at heart.

--

Mariano Guerra shared Compiling Dark to SQL

How do we make programs in Dark fast, while keeping complexity for developers really low?

We recently shipped a new Dark feature that compiles Dark code to SQL. This post goes into the nitty gritty details of how and why we built it.

--

Stefan Lesser shared Visual Calculations in the Shape Machine

What does it mean to have a new modeling software for design that allows scientists, engineers and designers to specify their actions by drawing shapes rather than by writing scripts? What is the difference between a shape you see and the way it is currently recorded in the database of your computer? What does it mean to program with shapes?

--

Ivan Reese shared Bret Victor's list of references

Didn't realize that Bret had directory listings enabled on his server, but it makes sense given other "open for people to view and tinker" things he's done. (My favourite: all his javascript is unminified so you can see how he implemented the dynamic examples in his essays.)