I am fine with pragmatic cultures importing ideas from the humanistic idealists (which is where I place myself) and doing their pragmatic stuff with deformed versions of them.

The question I am more interested in is how we can keep the humanistic culture alive and creative in a technological environment dominated by pragmatists following capitalist incentives. How we humanists can repurpose their tech for our needs without suffering from their pursuit of dominance.

those are later adopted by more pragmatic engineering/managerial cultures and transformed in a way that removes what makes them unique

@Tomas Petricek have you seen this type of co-option happening elsewhere?

I love your framing of cultures of programming. I see these cultures or “mindsets” (to throw a different name for it into the mix) all over the place and it is nice to read some well crafted thoughts about the impact each of these cultures (and the humans who embody multiple cultures) have on the work we do.

I read only the introduction, but I already love it! So many conflicts in my professional environment can be described concisely in terms of these cultures. A paper I co-authored recently could be summarized as "Dear managers, thanks for your attention to our work. But instead of telling us to become engineers, please take note that we are first and foremost hackers and humanists. Your friendly computational scientists."

First reaction: Hooray! This paper asks a vital question: "What is Programming?". The discussion of possible answers to this question is quite interesting. I might have a different view of what programming is, but, that doesn't matter as much as just having the question verbalized and seeing a discussion ensue.

I agree! The original framing of the paper was, in fact, “what is programming”, but as I worked on it I realized that this was (duh) way too broad a scope to take on in a week or two of writing. And I realized that, right now, I’m most interested in this narrower scope of blurring programming & direct use.

FWIW, I think @Tomas Petricek’s book takes on the “what is programming” question more broadly, adopting a “cultural” lens – how do different cultures think of programming differently? My paper implicitly adopts the perspective of the humanistic culture (“Socrates”). Very much Chapter-3 stuff.

I really enjoy the paper and I really appreciate what you have demonstrated with Sculpin. Thank you for sharing it here 🙂

discussing:

In my opinion, programming is the process of writing and storing a repeatable script that instructs a device (a machine or a biological system) to perform the same task repeatedly in a consistent manner.

...

What Is Programming?

Ohhh! Amazing to see how this interface has continued to evolve. Thanks so much for sharing this!

I need it right now 🤩 How do you call it? (it's not part of vlojure, right?)

BTW re shader authoring - if a shader has some controllable parameters, then it's possible to tune them automatically to match some target image. It's a fairly new thing still but IMO in a couple years it's going to change how we write shaders. Differentiable shaders today are where language models were in 2015. The only problem is that very few implementations exist right now (pixl.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Yang_2022_AAF/index.php is one) and they still lack a good end-user tooling.

It's called Easl Studio. That's the name of the IDE at least, the language is just called Easl, and it also has a human-readable textual representation that can be used standalone outside of the IDE.

Here's the textural representation of the code from the video, for example. The "slider" function used here is just an identity function, it returns the value passed to it. It's only there as a marker so the visual editor knows to show that value as a slider rather than a number literal.

Thanks for the link about the differentiable shader thing, looks super interesting. I've thought a bit about what it would look like to add autodiff to easl, since some other shader languages (e.g. slang) include it, and it seems like a nice feature to have. I know you can implement at least forward-mode differentiation fairly straightforwardly in languages with typeclasses/interfaces, and I'm working on an interface system for easl's type system. I'd always prefer for it to be possible to build that kind of thing as a library within the language itself, rather than treating it as a special language-level feature. I think there were also some recent advances showing you can do something similar with reverse-mode autodiff, but I haven't looked into the details. I'm not sure if it would be feasible to do that with the technique in the paper you linked or if that would require genuine language-level support or metaprogramming 🤔

It may not be as elegant, but if Easl's output can be translated back & forth between slang (or whatever A𝛿 uses) then autodiff could happen there. I guess Easl already outputs GLSL - the question it whether it can also ingest it...

Differentiable shaders are just a cool, related idea I wanted to mention. The Easl Studio already looks like it could give Shadertoy a run for its money 🙂

this looks like a lot of fun! I have a MUCH less polished version of something similar “puzzle dungeon” that I made a wee long time ago

Hahaha, I created the first version of this in 2013 I believe, and have been getting back to it for a day or two every 4 years. It's ancient !

But what's super cool now is that I could upgrade to Vue 3 and typescript and add a bunch of features with Cursor within a day.

I...can’t stop working on my procedurally generated picross puzzle game. I think I’m getting to the point where I’m willing to call it “done” though, now that I have 3 distinct versions:

• smallandnearlysilent.com/bicross is the base sketch where I figured it all out, and have been experimenting with layout and puzzle generation
• smallandnearlysilent.com/bicross/rpg is a more “fun” version of the puzzle because it has some nuance to it
• and smallandnearlysilent.com/bicross/daily is really really actually me capitalizing on how easy it is to ensure that everyone plays the same puzzle because I have seeded level generation

I still haven’t written up or recorded a “how to play” thing 😂