Seems related..

from press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo181533760.html

Some discussion here

forum.algorithmicpattern.org/t/algorithms-and-language/594

Totally agree! Do you think Amy’s focus on youth education also had an impact of Wordplay?

That introduction sounds... well, it sounds like the author lives in a very different world than I do. He makes it sound like rigorous/non-natural languages are some conspiracy against communication, when the truth is that they keep convergently evolving because natural language simply does not do the job of communicating these things. People have tried doing math and computation in words over and over and it's miserable every time.

More to the point, the abstract idea of an algorithm is very specifically a tool for communication, and evolved the way it did to be more effective in that role. Any argument that wants to claim it's actually an obstacle has a very heavy lift in front of it, and nothing in that intro suggests the author is aware of that.

I would further claim than any notion of LLMs (I assume this is what he's referring to as "machine learning"?) breaking this trend is an illusion. They will either evolve some form of rigor or (more likely) produce inscrutable messes.

Algorithms and their mechanized forms we call computer programs are indeed merely the latest step in what I'd label as formal methods if that label weren't already taken by CS in some more specific sense. That's a line of thought that can be traced back at least to Leibniz and easily beyond, to antiquity.

If there's a recent development that deserves criticism, it's the importance that algorithms have acquired in today's life. Computers have transformed them from a specialists' tool into one accessible not to everybody, but to a rather large elite, who is not always using it in the interest of the wider population.

I've only read the introduction of the book so far, but I don't think that's a fair characterisation of Binder's argument. Clearly granting mathematical abstractions objective existence is useful for sharing them, and he makes this clear.

Ref 'machine learning' I think you're reading the promotional blurb which might well have been written by the series editor rather than the author.

I need to read more, but so far see this more as pointing out that the way we think about algorithms has been different in the past, and is changing now.

It's a similar approach to Bret Victor in his "Future of Programming" talk. The 'future of programming' title seems to sometimes be taken unironically in this community but it's really about the past of programming, pointing out that in the early days, the possibilities were much more open than they are now, that programming has now got really stuck in a limited view of itself, and that we need to look back to look for ways of imagining an alternative future.

Thanks @Alex McLean for reminding is not to judge a book but a single page!

I'm interested to hear what his full argument is. I hope it's more specific than "the idea of an algorithm has changed over time". Anyway, the sole job of an introduction is to give you an idea of what the book is about, so I don't think it's unfair to pass provisional judgement on that basis.

I think the introduction is a really nice framing, and says much more than that.

I like this from page 12: "It is primarily these earlier ways of thinking—the ones that are noticeably different from modern computation—that I emphasize in this book. In the history of science, it is a methodological precept to avoid falling into the style called “Whig history”—to avoid, that is, describing historical developments through linear narratives of progress that implicitly side with the positions that won. Histories of mathematical symbols tend to be extremely Whiggish, complimenting authors who use notations that later became standard and chastising those who do not. I certainly do not mean to deny the advantages of symbolism, but my purpose is less to celebrate it than to understand it, and I accordingly hope to describe what was lost with the adoption of symbols as well as what was gained. I also hope to show that the symbolic method is not a fixed category. The ways people have understood symbols changed multiple times over the centuries, and the modern idea of algorithm is a product of particular circumstances and epistemological commitments."

I think there's an interesting parallel with musical staff notation here.. Some clear advantages in terms of communication, but also a great deal has been lost, e.g. the loss of canntaireachd in the scottish highlands

Whenever someone suggests that there’s something artificial about inventing formal notations, I’m reminded of this Bertrand Russell quote:

“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”

Jack Rusher hmm, artificial in what sense?

Hey I'll be presenting at this year's LIVE with a very art-for-arts-sake thing :) I've been pleasantly surprised with how positively people in the 'sphere' seem to respond to that sort of thing

@Alex McLean “attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day” -> this doesn’t require a guild or gatekeepers or anything of that kind, as formal languages are required to communicate precisely (which is also one of the limiters of the natural language to software pipeline some would like to see LLMs produce)

Lu Wilson that's great! I talked with the original organisers about this though and they were really open about the fact that they needed to disassociate their work from the arts for the sake of their careers. That's why they called it 'live programming' rather than 'live coding' - they wanted to create a new community that was separate from the existing community focussed on applications in the performing arts. That's totally understandable, but it's been a bit sad to see it drift away from acknowledging that community exists at all. To be fair there are probably similar separating forces on the other side.

Jack Rusher Yep agreed that formal languages are required to communicate algorithms precisely, but again I don't think Binder's argument is that mathematics is bad or anything like that. It's more that people have worked with algorithms in different ways in the past, and that there are a lot of possibilities for the future. I'm a bit surprised to see pushback for this idea here - isn't that what the 'future of coding' is about?

I'm not personally interested in LLMs at all though.. I'm too old to really engage with another 'AI' wave. I'm here for the more general idea of looking at the history of language and algorithms as a way to see and work beyond contemporary assumptions.

As others mentioned above, we have only the extended description to go by without reading the text. The description (which I agree was likely not written by the author) leans in the direction to which I’m reacting. I’ll be happy to read your more accurate review of the book! 🙂

I've quoted a couple of bits from the introduction.

@Alex McLean That's interesting, thanks! Some people don't realise that art and science are often more intertwined than they seem. It's not one or the other

[kicking off a thread to make it easier to reply]

I don’t think you are wrong! I don’t have anything profound to say that’s like “a fix,” but I’d say that community takes a lot of work, and knowing how to do that work is a difficult skill to cultivate. I think there is a lot of sort of “dropping it and wishing” where you sorta cross your fingers and hope a community appears because building that community is essentially a full time lift and the vibe here seems to be focused on making the stuff (which isn’t a value call by any means, just sort of a vibe check).

I don’t have a “thing,” per se, but the way I show up here is to try and ask questions without a strong inclination of where stuff will land, but curiosity about where it ends up.

I speak for myself, but often the more eye-opening stuff here leaves me a bit speechless/commentless. Often it takes a while to process it, but the impact has been had, and the influence has been made! A 🍰 emoji shows my appreciation

I’m scrolling up here and seeing 7 replies, 14 replies, 16 replies. Is that a little, or are you talking about other channels?

Personally, I use Slack-like software all day for work and am burned out on it. So during the week I usually just save links to savor on weekends. Slows down my pace of communication significantly, though. 😅

I'm stretched pretty thin, so I only weigh-in when I have either something trivial and jokey or something really substantial to add based on preexisting knowledge. Wish I could be more involved.

I’ll add that I do like that this place is sort of quiet. Chill vibes like a coffee shop on a slow day, or something. It is easy to keep up with, whereas some slacks I have to be in for work are like 100,000+ people shouting all at once

Yeah, I'm quite happy with the level of activity here, and how it's managed to sustain that level of activity for like 4 years now. I don't wish the community were busier.

I think my (greedy) wish, that I wish for all communities, be nothing can be so perfect, is that it was a bit less broadcast oriented. That folks were able to engage with stuff more deeply…but that may well be a me thing than like a community thing

I do feel like it's more discussion oriented now than it was 2+ years ago. But that's a subtle thing and I have no data. I just remember there being so many links posted which weren't sparking discussion that we split #linking-together off into its own channel, so that the torrent of links wouldn't drown out #thinking-together

Every top level post is somebody's life's work, as Gordon Brander says. I think it's healthy that we don't rush to fill the empty space below it with faff. Hacker News is right over there when I want empty spaces to be filled.

More generally, I tend to see a lot more about the world lately as having its own logic even if I don't understand the logic. Most things are not problems. Not rushing to label situations as problems keeps my powder dry and allows me to focus.

(It is true that Slack is uniquely able to keep me from noticing notifications. But that too is perhaps not a problem. I'll find posts a month or year from now, thanks to various history search tools, when I'm in the right mental space for them.)

I'm mostly a lurker here, and find that in many cases my response to posts is limited to "add this to my toRead queue for when I can devote the time it deserves"

I haven't seen so much of the general thematic discussion threads recently as I used to remember. However I personally appreciate being about to dip in every so often and still keep up to date.

A day later I'd like to add a corrective to my previous comment: if a post doesn't have enough discussion, the best way to change that is to.. comment! Be the change you want to see in the world. I don't mean to ever discourage anyone from commenting.

Also, #devlog-together exists for just random kibitzing on stuff you don't feel comfortable posting in another channel for whatever reason.

(big props for “kibitzing”)

(Technical term from the chess world.)

I love that $ in haskell, if it was gone I would cry! (And implement my own)

Same here. For people coming from other languages: you might know |> and maybe <| . (F#, Scala, Elixir, Elm, PureScript, … have them). $ is <| . The Haskell version of |> is known as & which is mainly useful if you want to split a long expression over multiple lines (and read it top-to-bottom).

goto turns up in many, many places where performance matters. Here are ~5 pages of hits for goto in the Linux kernel, for example:

github.com/search?q=repo%3Atorvalds%2Flinux+goto&type=code&p=1

Dijkstra could make his argument only because he didn’t do much of this kind of work.

I quit this episode due to the audio hijinks

Christopher Galtenberg Me too!

My first ever program was in BBC BASIC:

10 PRINT "MATT IS ACE"

20 GOTO 10

Where is the harm in that 🙂

Seriously though Jack Rusher you make a great point. It's easy to write a "chainsaws considered harmful" paper, but there are contexts where chainsaws are extremely useful (and relatively safe).

Back in the day I wrote up a little story about a lesson that might be relevant here: akkartik.name/post/swamp

People are doing dependency injection without dependency inversion? Why? How?

Andrew F What I mean is that you should not do dependency injection for its own sake, but as a potential implementation of the dependency inversion principle:

If you have an object that ‘does all the things’ which is threaded around everywhere and whenever you need to do anything you use the object, you only make code harder to read.

But if you have small objects which each implement only a single well-defined short interface, then it is easy to follow the logic and swap things out.

I hope my explanation makes sense

Most of your takes are actually luke-warm, in my opinion.

Yeah, I agree. I was dissatisfied with that aspect of the episode.

but it definitely is better than tightly coupling your code on implementation details

Yeah, I definitely disagree with this one. I'd much rather my application code be about the implementation details. Interfaces don't matter at that level. Implementation details do.

But if you have small objects which each implement only a single well-defined short interface, then it is easy to follow the logic and swap things out.

I just need one interface call . 🙂

That's a really cool idea! I personally have some strong ideas about what capitalism got wrong, and what we can do better, but I havn't ever thought of something like this! If you wanna talk, that would be amazing

Nice thoughts! It reminds me of stumbling across the MOTIVATION file that came with emacs when I was a student, talking about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.. it made an impression on me back then, a bit sad to see it's been removed at some point in the last few years.. I guess the research it's reporting on is very old at this point though

Re: the preamble -- given that capitalism has exerted such a destructive force on the planet, felt first by the most vulnerable spaces, George Monbiot, the journalist, writer, and environmentalist, co-authored a paper in the Schumacher Institute in which he presents a phrase and concept I absolutely love: "public luxury, private sufficiency". In line with your pledge, I believe most systems would benefit from applying this kernel.

@Arvind Thyagarajan centerforneweconomics.org/publications/private-sufficiency-public-luxury-land-is-the-key-to-the-transformation-of-society makes for brutal reading.

Since you posted this Kartik Agaram I've been trying to think about what I find meaningful in making things with code. Personally I don't find making promises or planning too much ahead of time motivational although I can definitely see how it is for others. I think for me meaning comes from understanding/learning what I'm doing through the process of coding it, sharing software I've made and then see people do weird unexpected things with it, and connecting with others through live coding. Making money from it isn't really a motivation, although that is a privilege really.. plus I work for a non-profit and am not allowed to make commercial products or prototypes as a condition of my funding..

Kartik Agaram Your programmer's pledge is about single-person projects, right? What about the more frequent case of team, enterprise, or community projects? Would you make the pledge part of a code of conduct, for example?

Also.. capitalism. It's everybody's favorite enemy today. For good reasons. But we tend to forget that lots of other economic systems share the fundamental issue of capitalism of not respecting the limits of the biosphere. All growth-oriented systems, to be more precise. And that's everything starting with agriculture. The quest for growth has been going on for a few thousand years, with lots of variations, but always the same outcome of humans and their sphere of influence (technology, crops, domestic animals, ...) taking an increasing share of natural resources (energy, water, ...). Capitalism is merely the most technically perfected way of striving for growth.

Conclusion: we need a lot more than a change of attitude of programmers to get onto a sustainable trajectory.

I'm very glad I posted this, because y'all are poking at concrete gaps where I only vaguely sensed that some gaps existed 😄

@Alex McLean I wasn't really thinking about digital artists or live-coding communities when I wrote that draft. (Do y'all call yourselves "programmers"? I can see a case for that seeming like a cooty-inducing term 😄) My focus is more on a dynamic of "productive" software that insinuates itself into people's habits, and then exercises power (often accompanied by rent extraction). I think y'all are all good here. (Though do tell me if I seem to be mischaracterizing you, or if I sound like I'm excluding anyone. I tend to think of y'all's position as: you get a voice, but you don't bear much responsibility for what has occurred so far.)

Konrad Hinsen There are certainly many problems facing the world today, and my two paragraphs aren't intended to address them all. Re growth vs sustainability, I'll just point out that getting people to think hard about what we each find meaningful seems more resource-efficient than having whole countries go through the motions of bullshit jobs just to engage in zero-sum status games, all while mining the planet and polluting externalities. A focus on durable artifacts will hopefully lead to fewer artifacts.

My focus is just on programmers. I don't pretend to know enough to tell other industries or fields what to do.

</handwave>

I'm deliberately positioning the pledge at the level of individual projects. There's no limit on how many projects a person can start. At the same time, the start of a project is a high-leverage point at which to set its trajectory. I think we all have experience of joining projects later. It's much harder to change their direction then. Whatever the rules were at the start, we mostly tend to follow them.

Re "enterprise", one thing I want to draw attention to is that the value capture limit is phrased as a raw number, not a per capita number. And it is not profit. These are two deliberate decisions. I tend to think there's something vaguely unethical about successful artifacts indefinitely milking society to hire increasing numbers of people for indefinite periods that mostly has the effect of degrading the artifact. I'd like it to be more "glamorous" to build something, freeze it and disband. (Like a game or a movie.) Get what you wanted out of it, then give it away. (Not like a game or movie at the moment.) Get out of the way for a new project to build on the artifact. This worldview considers one-time charges for products morally/ethically superior to ongoing subscriptions. (Services of course are a separate matter. I don't have an opinion there. Though there might be an argument that programming is fundamentally about building artifacts, and the need for something to be an ongoing service is a failure on some level..)

To add to Konrad Hinsen’s comment: I also find it disappointing that almost everyone I see using the word capitalism online — whether pro or con — seems to be talking about something else. It would be nice if more precise terms were used.

Kartik Agaram I don't really understand what you mean.. I am indeed a programmer, although don't really see any distinction between programming and coding - I use them interchangeably. I've made credit card management software, web platforms and ecommerce systems as well as pure FRP-based music systems and don't think my motivations have changed so much. Certainly music software is productive, gets into peoples habits and can exert commercial power. Some people (like Steven Pinker) don't see music as serious or important but I strongly disagree, it's intrinsic to human life. and I think it is also intrinsic to the 'future of coding'.

Jack Rusher Agreed and I'm aware I'm using the term vaguely.. TBH I just lack the education to talk about politics or economics intelligently, but still find it good to talk about.

I think Bret Victor's motivations speak well to the future of coding being very different to how we think about programming now, and that essentially, we have little idea about what we're really working towards. All we have is a guiding intuition. There's a lot we can learn from music making here. worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.html

Of course Bret started out making music interfaces..

I like the idea of the programmer's pledge. Not able to put it into exact words yet, but I have the feeling I'd like the pledge part to be more human and nature centred and less about economics. I do understand 'capitalism' and 'money' were your points of attention. And I'm also very much in favour of moving away from money as a driver for what we do or don't. If we try to move away from economics (say "no" to), what are we actually after (say "yes" to), what could we pledge then? Just from the hip: "I will build things which empower humans (instead of taking away their empowerment/agency)", 'I will build things others can build with me (search for co-creation)", "I will not build things which are 'over' sufficient (I will not build too much)", "I will build things that are durable for the foreseen lifetime", etc. The last bit being about resource usage which has it marks on our environment(al footprint).

I'm trying to see if I can come up with a more concise set of pledges the coming weeks. See how well I do on those in my work 😉.

Kinda reminds me of the Inventing on Principle from Bret (Alex beat me to it, bringing Bret into the discussion 😉).

youtube.com/watch?v=EGqwXt90ZqA

@Alex McLean I think you understand me just fine and I'm just wrong 😅 I need to reflect more on what you've said, as someone who's been on both sides of a divide that is just in my head.

So credit card management doesn't exercise a different hemisphere of the brain for you than making music? (Sorry, I only have wrong ways to talk about this stuff..)

Jack Rusher can you think of better terms we could be using here? Or are we just failing to communicate entirely? Would just adding "US" to various terms help?

Kartik Agaram I didn't mean to imply that programmers should (or could) save the world. But programmers have an unusually high leverage in their decisions. Their indirect impact on the environment, via the actions of others that they encourage or discourage in their software, is more important than their direct impact. So I'd expect a programmer's pledge to include topics such as suggested by @Erik Stel above.

Kartik Agaram it's been a while.. but working on payment processing was mostly writing c code to pre-written specs but there was some room for finding creative solutions to problems.. A big part of making music for me is making new representations for music, which is really hard and is definitely some of the most interesting and technically challenging work I've done in my career. Actually making live music by live coding does feel very different though in a number of ways.. Being fully absorbed in the sonic output of your code while changing it, with a room full of people are dancing to it, is just a lovely time. It does seem like a very different activity to systems programming, but someone has to program the live coding system in the first place, and building and using systems happens in the same community, with everyone coding in some way.. like with dynamicland, things can get interesting when you break down the barriers between systems programming and live interaction.

Konrad Hinsen Agreed! I'd love to see more ideas for a pledge that includes these topics.

One criterion that seems important to me is objectivity. It should be really obvious to someone juggling a baby whether you're hewing to your pledge or not. A pledge that tries to say more but permits equivocation seems like a net negative to me. Because then you can paper over broken promises with marketing. I.e. by spending money. Which brings us back to the sad situation we're trying to escape.

If you lived around the era of competing models of the cosmos in the late 1500s after Copernicus, you would be totally correct to expect that a good theory should explain the lack of Coriolis forces on the Earth's surface. But it took 300 years to get a good story here, and in the meantime we went through 3 more models of the heavens that incrementally improved things. So the world doesn't always cooperate with the expectations people have..

At this point in our history it seems to me that with some of these thorny questions like sustainability or efficiency, a direct approach is unlikely to succeed. It'll just be too easy to game. But they were very much on my mind when I came up with my draft, and I've tried to indirectly nudge people in the right direction along those dimensions, as best I could.

Hopefully this clarifies some of the rationale for my current design. But I'm only trying to explain my thought process, not discourage others from exploring these directions.

Kartik Agaram Most of what you’ve described here seems to be about a collection of bad social norms that became widespread in the anglophone world after Reagan/Thatcher (and sadly show signs of spreading further). I hate that stuff too, but it isn’t “capitalism” per se. Likewise, the things that provide an important (“load bearing”) informational role in modern economies are markets and prices, which can exist in non-capitalistic arrangements.

Agreed. Cory Doctorow has been doing a good job lately describing the history of antitrust regulation in the US, particularly the failure to regulate since Reagan/Thatcher. Calling the system of the last 40 years "capitalism" seems to be an unfortunate consequence of the word getting redefined during these neoliberal years.

Great article and comment in this context:

• blog.liw.fi/posts/2023/debian-reasons
• news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37811024&submission=37809276

There's a lot more in this heaven and earth than I can dream of yet..