You know...I've had similar experiences in the past as well, and I think what drew me to Programming as Theory Building was less the argument that it was impossible to gain a theory of the program without it being passed person to person from the original authors and more just a description of the idea of 'becoming an expert with it to the extent that it feels like your baby'.

More that it puts words and an explanation to that concept where you gain an intuition for how the machine will work with different inputs, if there's a bug, having an intuition for where it likely is, and how to make changes to it quickly and safely...

There's probably a through-line here about how software engineers are primarily communicators. Even when we do not identify as designers, our actual tasks are to identify needs, get buy-in, and cultivate trust.

Perspective-taking works for artifacts and not just audiences.

Huh, interesting...that second sentence wasn't where I thought you were going with that thought...I immediately went to thinking about how you may write code in a particular way in a particular place to communicate something specific about it to future readers...and I don't think I've seen much about that concept

There should be more rhetoric of code for sure, for sure.

I had an experience in the past where one of my teammates was working on a PR for another team's library and recognized an opportunity for a really clean refactor...but since the other team didn't know us really well, we decided to pare the change way back and just hint at the refactor in the PR by subtly making our code also work really easy with that potential refactored interface...giving them the chance to recognize it and decide whether to go in that direction or not...

wow I'm not familiar with rhetoric of code

this looks like exactly what I've been looking for haha

I see 2 distinct tasks here: (1) control a machine, (2) communicate to other human programmers what was intended. This sounds like 2 languages, one for each task. And, a tool to tie the two together. Programming languages attempt to do a union of both tasks which just makes the problem harder.

Hm I'm not sure if you can actually split them out...or at least (1) contains a lot of (2) whether you intend it to or not.

I agree, but, I think that this is a problem. Conflating 2 concepts generally makes the solution 10x harder. We must use assembler to program CPUs, but, we don't actually need to be using sequential coding languages for anything higher level than that.

I enjoyed the manifesto-README

APL and FORTH (from which Joy derives) are both widely derided for being write-only languages. Nevertheless, there has yet to be a language of such concise expressive power as APL or its descendants. APL is powerful not because of its bizarre symbols or syntax, but due to the way it automatically maps operations over arrays and allows iterations at depth within arrays. This means one almost never needs to write a loop or think about operations one-at-a-time. Instead one can think about operations on whole structures.

While I agree personally with this perspective, teaching NumPy (whose core is APL in Python syntax) for many years lead me to the conclusion that for many people, loops seem more natural. Maybe due to prior exposure to more mainstream languages, I can't say. All my exercises started with "remember: no loops!", and yet, most solutions implemented by the students had at least one explicit loop.

FWIW: I endeared myself to my summer employer by taking a few minutes to rewrite Fortran-oriented-APL into APL-oriented-APL. What took 1 weekend to run on an S/370, took mere minutes.

This looks really cool, and if you want a more generalized language that is both stack and array based there's UIUA uiua.org Enjoy!

Aside: discovering APL when trying to write a program to implement the Space Groups in architectural computation is what led me down the array programming and then Future of Coding (and then esolangs) wormhole.

(The program is out as a C# based plugin for the visual programming language Grasshopper but hasn't been implemented in APL yet.)

BTW, anyone looking at APL for mind expansion should also have a look at implementation techniques. There are many open source implementations of APL-like languages to look at. Much of that code looks almost alien.

i didn't write this

Ah. Will edit. The article doesn't state an author, and the website feel collective.

it's by pastagang

Oh, like the collective cyborg hive organism? Very cool.

yeah and to be clear i personally didnt write any of those words in that post

every pull request is merged to the pastagang blog/website/etc you are welcome to commit anything, i can even give you admin access

Yes please. I would like to join your cyborg collective.

i added u. add/edit/delete anything

my magician transhumanist non-transgender friend Scott Jeffrey always put transgender as as apex transhumanism, good too see that validated by another human independently. I shall send him this immediately! (I also agree the phones make everyone cyborgs)

link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-54950-1