News: Dark has run out of money and is going employee-owned, I guess? And they're going open source. Seems like making the very best of a bad situation. Kudos to them.

I'm going to forever take the FoC podcast episode on Rules of Code as license to consider the law and philosophy in scope here. Here's a fantastic bit of writing, just in holding my debased attention span 40 years later: James Boyd White, "Law as rhetoric, rhetoric as law: The arts of cultural and communal life"

(A hack for sticking with it.)

Dyad is a declarative physical modeling language that has a one-to-one mapping with GUI views. This gives a textual representation that is amenable to analysis and generation by generative AI and devops pipelines, while allowing the same artifact to be used in the graphical environment.

help.juliahub.com/dyad/dev

Ultorg 2.0 Released!

Ultorg is an efficient, spreadsheet-like UI for complex business data. Query and edit data across tables and relationships, without SQL or custom CRUD apps.

A different take on s-expressions making them more.. visual?

The Advent of Computing podcast has an episode on Intercal — and apparently also resurrected (at some level) the original compiler (to run on x86).

A nice podcast episode with Jim Rutt inverviewing @Sam Arbesman on his new book "The Magic of Code" (which is now on my reading list). A good reminder (for those who need it, perhaps not so much people here) that computing is not just utilitarian.

Since Sam is around here, some short feedback:

• It's weird to hear both of you dismissing APL as a mess not even worth learning, and then discussing computing as a tool for thought a few minutes later. The link between the topic should be obvious from just the title of Ken Iverson's Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a tool of thought:null:", which I definitely recommend everybody to read. APL was designed as a mathematical notation for algorithmic problems, and only later turned into an executable notation at IBM. It is certainly not, and was never meant to be, a language for writing large software systems. But for its intended problem domain, it still is a good choice.
• Programming languages not based on English are indeed rare, but there are a few interesting examples beyond just translating keywords. 文言 (wenyan) is based on classical Chinese that tries to incorporate even its grammar. Perligata similarly takes inspiration from Latin grammar to build a Perl-like language on something pretty close to Latin (though not being "good" Latin, neither in vocabulary nor grammar). For those who read French, the slides of a presentation by Baptiste Mélès say something about both these projects (I think the presentation was recorded, but I can't find it anywhere). Hedy by @Felienne and coworkers is a very different take on this topic: a language meant to make programming accessible to people from various cultural backgrounds.

Programming languages not based on English are indeed rare, but there are a few interesting examples beyond just translating keywords

Also Ramsey Nasser's Qalb)