Future of Coding Weekly

Trying to help map the cell structure of a reactive runtime. WIP this is overwhelming but it looks pretty. The clumps are modules. The concentrated rainbow arc is pointing at the stdlib. It does communicate the intense collaberation inside a module and the sparse connections between modules though.

📷 image.png

Thinking Together

🗨️ Oleksandr Kryvonos: https://natto.dev/

can someone remind me there is a project that was shared here, a canvas for JS workflows... ? found it - https://natto.dev/

🗨️ When Leggett:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-07-01

So obviously ignore this discussion prompt if it seems dumb or out of scope. Its maybe not as "direct" a connection to the future of coding.

Lately I've been finding myself wondering more and more often what kinds of agents might be sneaking into different spaces and for what different purposes. On places like reddit, instagram, or bluesky, we know that there are plenty of bots engagement farming or pushing misinformation or advertising or simply acting as fake followers to boost accounts. However, we know that bots/fake accounts are also a common vector for scraping, as it can bypass rate limiting or private areas like this slack.

In the last several years, as social media platforms have become enshittified, and the average user has felt less inclined to post, and started spending more time in messaging and group chat spaces like whatsapp, discord, signal, slack etc. In small group spaces, like a personal friend group, you obviously wouldn't have a bot sneak in, but a group chat like this one has thousands of members and it likely would be easy for a bot to get in. Who knows, there may be one or more here now.

So here are my questions: - do you think there are bots here? - If so, does it bother you? Do you feel like you want to preserve human discussion spaces from spying, interference, scraping, or being trained on? - Do we need to consider more deeply how the future of computing will be affected by so many non-human users including many malicious actors? - Do we need an improvement at the infrastructure/ecosystem level to securely/practically enable the kind of end-user programming that is commonly discussed here? To own your connections/contacts/community. To have better protocols/standards/etc for communication. Are we really stuck on email as the only really open mainstream communication standard?

Linking Together

🗨️ Ivan Reese: 🎨 Paint: a timeline

A beautiful virtual museum of digital painting programs throughout the history of computing, from the 60s through the 90s (via Patrick Dubroy) — Paint: a timeline

🗨️ Jasmine Otto:

📝 Code⇄GUI bidirectional editing via LSP

📝 Code⇄GUI bidirectional editing via LSP

x-posting James Vaughan (via redblobgames):

Intriguing: live editing usually lets you edit some value in the browser or running app, but with an "LSP server" you can have it work with your existing text editor to edit in the original environment

I built a small proof-of-concept for a system that enables real-time bidirectional editing between any modern code editor and a GUI, enabled by an LSP1 server. Code-based CAD I like working on small projects at home that benefit from CAD. I’m also a programmer with a personal development environment that I’ve spent years making as cozy as possible. Naturally I’ve been interested in finding code-based CAD system to use for my projects that allows me to use that cozy development environment.

Present Company

🗨️ Andrew F:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-30

Does anyone know of a nice accessible survey of the state of reactive programming today, ideally with a focus on the different flavors/features and what kind of patterns they enable?

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/06 Week 5

2025-06-30 09:02

🎥 Virtual Meetup 12 • June 2025 🗓️ Next FoC Meetup 🔌 MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

Share Your Work

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 📝 Explaining software and computational methods

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-26

A blog post about my recent work, which is what I demoed a while ago in an online meetup: Explaining software and computational methods

🗨️ Guyren Howe: 📝 First-Class Models: The Missing Productivity Revolution

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-26

This will likely interest the folks here:

📝 First-Class Models: The Missing Productivity Revolution

TL;DR: First-class models with branching and merging capabilities represent an almost entirely unused enormous productivity and expressiveness unlock in programming and computer systems.

First-Class Models: The Missing Productivity Revolution

🗨️ Scott: 🔌 MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-28

Wrote up some more thoughts based on the idea I shared over in of-ai. I think MCP might be the answer to "how" we're going to get the personalized/customizable software that people keep saying AI is going to make possible: MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-29

I'm really happy with this month's FoC bonus episode discussion. Jimmy and I talk about literal values in code (string, numbers, arrays, etc), looking at them as affordances, trying to think about the human-facing elements of their design, as distinct from (but related to) how they serve as syntax, how they get parsed, what they mean at runtime, etc. We also ruminate on literal values in various flavours of visual programming.

You do need to subscribe in order to hear the episode ($5/mo), but by doing so you're also supporting the time/effort it takes us to make both these bonus episodes and the main show. So thank you to everyone who does support this effort, and hopefully you find this discussion invigorating.

DevLog Together

🗨️ Kartik Agaram: 🎥 James Boyd White, "Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law" : Kartik Agaram - Internet Archive

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-27

It seemed worth doing: I just recorded a video reading out every word of the 1985 paper "Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law".

(previously)

In which I read out every word of James Boyd White's 1985 paper, Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life which spawned the...

James Boyd White, "Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law" : Kartik Agaram : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Linking Together

🗨️ wtaysom:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-28

Over time Cory Doctorow's fictional futures have gradually moved closer and closer to the present, and in "Picks and Shovels" the clock finally turns back to around 1985, and I have three FoC relevant quotes...

Thumbing further [through an issue of Creative Computing], I found an ad for something called a “Logo Turtle” billed as a “cybernetic toy” that you programmed in “a language for poets, scientists and philosophers.” I decided I liked whoever had written that ad.

Accounting was fascinating enough, but the fact that we were doing it in VisiCalc spreadsheets made it all-consuming. Auto-mating the tabulations made it possible to automate errors, to commit them with a scale and velocity that mere pen-and-paper accountancy could not have hoped to match. Tiny errors in formulas could cascade through sheets and workbooks, creating subtle, compounding errors that were nearly impossible to catch and even harder to root out.

I'll put the third, longer quote into the thread, but it begins "Spreadsheets are a form of science fiction."

End User Programming

🗨️ hvrosen: Teen Hacker Fined After Making Local Traffic Lights Sync Properly

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-27

End-user programming in-the-wild ;-)

Teen Hacker Fined After Making Local Traffic Lights Sync Properly

Present Company

🗨️ Ivan Reese: 🎥 Virtual Meetup 12 • June 2025

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-26

The most recent FoC Virtual Meetup was fantastic. Three great presentations covering a pretty wide range of the FoC spectrum. The recording is live right here. Thanks again to our presenters, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone next month.

Virtual Meetup 12 • June 2025

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy: 🦋 interjectedfuture.com

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-27

Thinking about this post implying node-and-wires are mutally exclusive with ASCII code and also thinking about guitarvydas dislike of functions. Also connecting it with my own ideas that a good notebook should offer "multiple views of the same thing".

Made me think: why is everyone stuck on the idea that there is one one possible representation? And I think guitarvydas has a point, it may be the function calling paradigm. In my work, I don't have this problem because cells subscribe to other cells in dataflow, so multiple consumers of a computation is not a problem. cells pull their dependancies. Whereas function calling is "pushing" values. The problem with pushing is you can only have one target. But with pulling you can have multiple consumers from one source. functions is building out of 1-to-1 links, but pulling is 1-to-many inherently.

I don't think that argument is water tight coz, of course, its all Turing computable, but I do think there is something in there that function calling ends up naturally reducing computational reusability so that trying to do pub-sub communication patterns ends up way harder and buggier than it should so you shouldn't bother unless absolutely necessary. But if you build out of pub-sub exclusively then you don't see multiple views of the same thing as an unusual concept.

Nodes and wires are so attractive because it's legible in a certain context. The context is when you're a beginner and you want to see the in-between results.

Breaks down when you know syntax, when you can imagine the intermediates in your head, and when the program gets large.

🗨️ Maikel: 🗓️ FoC Meetup · Luma

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-29

Hi, we have a date for our new online FoC meetup : Wednesday 23th of July 18:00UTC ..this is the link for the event on luma : https://lu.ma/1d5mc44t .. and more information about the setup of our virtual meetups can be found here: https://futureofcoding.org/meetups (please read carefully if you want to demo/present) .. for next meetup we already have one confirmed guest so we're looking for2 more demo/presenter. Let us know in the chat here or contact me directly. Thanks!

Information about our meetup can be found here : https://futureofcoding.org/meetups

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/06 Week 4

2025-06-23 11:22

🦅 Eagle Mode 🎥 This is not a Clojure talk 💾 Ultorg 2.0 Released

Two Minute Week

🗨️ Jasmine Otto:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-22

Dusting off my Bitsy fork with simultaneous editing across clients. Right now I have Automerge imported and working. Except - while Bitsy is a tiny game engine, it's a massive project to refactor into ES6 modules, due to that Automerge dependency.

This week I got Bitsy's built-in icons working, and I've yanked all of the onclick bindings from inline HTML into a shim module. As I refactor out all of the global state leaks, I have discovered one actual cyclic dependency between modules. I bet I can fix this with an existing instance object.

Share Your Work

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

I've been exploring combining Reactive UI components (those that separate the state, the methods to update the state, and computed values such as the UI), with the same methods given as tools to LLM-powered agent. The user can then either use the UI as normal or ask the AI to act on the state: with perfect fidelity between the two.

I want to see if there is an abstraction concise enough for such components to live on the server instead of the client to enable multiplayer realtime collaboration across many humans and agents. It ought to be possible to accomplish this with much less plumbing.

📷 image.png

🗨️ guitarvydas:

Beginnings of Scheme (prolog-6.scm) to Javascript tranpsiler using t2t and PBP and Ohm-editor, debug session recording

FYI... Prolog Related References

🗨️ guitarvydas: 🦅 Eagle Mode

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-20

brainstorming:

A friend was fooling with a midi/mixer control surface as a layered interface to a bank of apps/subdirectories. A grid of buttons, push into one then get a sub-grid of buttons within it, or, open the app.
IMO, software is just soft hardware. What ideas come to mind for simulating a Z controller before committing to hardware? It seems that an obvious choice might be to put a 2nd scroll bar next to the Y scroll bar. The 2nd scroll bar might be "Z"oom in/out and it might be shaped in a more triangular manner than just a rectangular movable thumb on a rectangular bar. In an orthogonal vein: Ivan Reese posted some interesting looking circular knob ideas.
2 sliders, one to control scrollable thing, one to control resolution of 1st slider.
veering even further away from the original thread, there are ZUIs like EagleMode.

Homepage of Eagle Mode (eaglemode) - a zoomable user interface (ZUI) with file manager, file viewers, audio/video player, games, fractals, and C++ toolkit API.

🗨️ Jack Rusher: 🎥 This is not a Clojure talk - Jack Rusher | Craft 2025

My latest talk, given at Craft Conf in Budapest. There were some technical difficulties, but it should hopefully serve as a reasonable introduction to the virtues of interactive development in Clojure.

This is not a Clojure talk - Jack Rusher | Craft 2025

🗨️ Karl Toby Rosenberg:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-21

TahDah: https://github.com/KTRosenberg/DrawTalking

A prototype user experience concept for building interactive worlds and telling stories at the same time by sketching and speaking

🗨️ Scott: 📝 The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-22

I wrote a fun little post about something I've been playing around with with LLMs, how might programming change when LLMs can get what you mean without you getting it exactly right:

📝 The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles

or how I learned to stop worrying and love fuzzy vegetables

The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles

DevLog Together

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-19

I'm still thinking a lot about what a "point literal" or a "vec literal" means in the context of visual programming.

In text we have "string literal", it has a bunch of affordances. In visual/spatial/tangible/etc programming, we'd probably want other primitive types with their own set of affordances. So point and vec, obviously. I wonder what else we'd want, and how it would look and act.

Linking Together

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-17

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.

🗨️ Kartik Agaram:

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.)

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

https://help.juliahub.com/dyad/dev/

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.

🗨️ Mariano Guerra:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-19

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.

🗨️ Kartik Agaram:

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

🗨️ David Alan Hjelle: 🎥 Episode 158 - INTERCAL RIDES AGAIN - Restoring a Lost Compiler

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-19

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

Episode 158 - INTERCAL RIDES AGAIN - Restoring a Lost Compiler

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 🎙️ Samuel Arbesman on The Magic of Code - The Jim Rutt Show

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-21

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.

Jim talks with Samuel Arbesman about his book The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future.

EP 304 Samuel Arbesman on The Magic of Code - The Jim Rutt Show

🗨️ brett g porter:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-21

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

AI

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

https://jeffhuber.substack.com/p/ai-is-a-new-computer

AI is a new kind of computer.

A traditional computer processes structured data with deterministic instructions.
AI processes unstructured data with natural-language nondeterministic instructions.

I like the simplicity of this framing.

But personally, I am more interested in unifying both these kind of computational work: Mathematical (precise & deterministic data structures and instructions) and human-media centric (language, image/audio/video etc) which approximate/ambiguous.

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

🐦 Oriol Vinyals (@OriolVinyalsML) on X

Gemini Flash Lite generating UI on-the-fly:

Hello Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite! So fast, it codes *each screen* on the fly (Neural OS concept :point_down:).

The frontier isn't always about large models and beating benchmarks. In this case, a super fast & good model can unlock drastic use cases.

Read more: https://t.co/kbkC8CtVYb

Oriol Vinyals (@OriolVinyalsML) on X

🗨️ Scott:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-09

Have any of you here spent any time with MCPs at all?

I've just started building an MCP client into this app i'm working on, and it hit me that this could be what enables a lot more of end user modification of programs and a version of Malleable software...though not completely malleable. You don't have to interact with them through a conversational or agentic interface, you can just treat them like RPCs, and if you set up standardized integration points into your application, users can build all types of customizations for at the very least the objects or metaphors within your system

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/06 Week 3

2025-06-16 11:03

📝 Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps 🎥 Playing tag with dragons 🎥 AI's Non-Euclidean Geometry

Note: trying new process to generate the newsletter, let me know if something doesn't work :)

Share Your Work

🗨️ hamish todd: 🎥 AI's Non-Euclidean Geometry: when gradient descent's shortest path doesn't look like a straight line

Hey folks, AI-related video 😃 Sorry. The reason I'm thinking about the geometry of this is because I'm hoping it might lead to UI ideas, hence posting here.

🎥 AI's Non-Euclidean Geometry: when gradient descent's shortest path doesn't look like a straight line

AI's Non-Euclidean Geometry: when gradient descent's shortest path doesn't look like a straight line

🗨️ Mariano Guerra:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-09

Playing with a time traveling WebAssembly visual interpreter, just added the call instruction and call stack

🎥 wasmvm call stack

🗨️ Dan Peddle: sombra - Chrome Web Store

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-11

I’ve been somewhat frustrated by limitations in AI agents when it came to both them deciding which web resources might be relevant, and their inability to retrieve private data. If it’s not public, you have to have some method to expose that data to (for example) Claude Desktop or similar - and it has to live in a different silo. Rebuilding all that context time and again is also a pain.

With all that in mind, and with some downtime in hand, I’ve put together Sombra - a tool that combines traditional web scraping techniques (the original arc90 readability algorithm) with a modern, authenticated remote MCP connection, consumable by compatible clients.
Web pages that you save are stored as markdown and can be organised into collections - and those collections are then available via MCP resources. Scraping happens client-side, so if you can see the content in Chrome, you can save it to your collection. I added screenshot capture too - but haven’t exposed that to MCP yet. I’d be curious if that might be helpful to any of you - it feels like it might be too much when the markdown is available - maybe the visual references could be another resource? About the name, why sombra? I was thinking of sci-fi references such as Peter Hamilton’s u-shadow, or the idea of a “shadow” in Silo - I’d like to evolve this concept further in the future.

The stack is Clojure/Datomic on the backend with a TypeScript Chrome extension - the early release is now publicly available.

If any of this sounds interesting, I’d love some feedback! It’s one of those projects that scratches a personal itch, and then possibly got a bit out of hand - but having built it, it feels like it would be a shame not to put it out there, in case it helps others. Thanks!

🗨️ Mariano Guerra:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-13

Wasm visual interpreter update:

block, loop, break, break if, i32 comparison ops
function inspector and switcher

🎥 wasmvm loop

🗨️ guitarvydas: 📝 Using Existing PLs as Assembly Languages

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-15

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-10

So for the LLM to explore the dependancy graph I added the "dependsOn" cross-links to the already well worn "moduleMap" function. Now I have that information available I can visualize it nicely! and furthermore I made it reactive to the runtime changes so its always up to date.

🎥 reactive dependancy graph

🗨️ Oleksandr Kryvonos:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-14

accidentally I discovered that typing without backspace might be somewhat fun
https://uprun.github.io/web-editor/keeped-2025-06-15-no-backspace-challenge.html

🎥 Demo

Thinking Together

🗨️ Joshua Horowitz:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-12

Two related things:

The LIVE Workshop deadline is July 21st, so there’s still plenty of time to get a submission together! Please let me know if you have any questions, or want to talk about a submission.
I’ve been cooking up a LIVE Primer. It’s an overview of LIVE-adjacent research – mapping out some territory, sharing some advice, & curating some citations. It’s rough right now, but I think there’s good stuff in there already. Please take a look and let me know what you think. (Especially if there’s something you wish was in there that isn’t; that would be great to know.)

Thanks!

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-13

I think that Kartik Agaram’s recent devlog post (mentioned in this thread) deserves a thread of its own, outside of the discussion of live programming. The topic that interests me in particular is what he calls the vendor/owner divide, which bothers me as well.

More generally, it's a dependency chain from hardware vendor via OS vendor and programming tool vendor up to the owner, end user, or whatever else we'd call the person or team that wants to use computation as a tool for their own goals. Along this chain, everyone has the power to break the work of the people further down the chain, unless there is some counteracting force such as competition between multiple vendors of fungible products.

As somebody at the end of the chain, if I want to preserve my agency, I have basically two choices (plus hybrids): I can be selective in my dependency chain, only accepting dependencies whose vendors I consider friendly and ethically sound. Or I can restrict myself to dependencies that are fungible because they implement standards for which there are other implementations as well.

Out of the two, my preference is for the latter, which is clearly the more robust strategy. Vendors change over time, and even those that promise not to be evil today can drop this promise tomorrow. Vendors or their products can also disappear for lots of reasons. In fact, a vendor that is serious about being ethically sound should signal this attitude by implementing standards, reducing its own power over its clients. Except of course that there are no standards for most software interface layers, and you cannot create one unilaterally either. Nor quickly, because good standards require many design iterations involving multiple vendors and users. Evolving standards is expensive.

There's a third aspect to consider, which is code complexity. For simple enough software, a vendor provides the convenience of a ready-made and tested implementation, but if the vendor disappears or becomes evil, I can maintain the code myself, or convince someone else to do so. That's what early FLOSS advertised as its strength: you can always fork. Except that today's software stacks have grown too complex for this.

🗨️ guitarvydas: Solution Centric Programming

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-15

I created a document repo on github and a channel on discord programming simplicity for anyone interested in discussing and adding ideas...

from a substack article, brainstorming SCP
We explored how this principle led us from single-machine programming to *Solution Centric Programming* (SCP), which treats hundreds of small computing devices (Arduinos, sensors, actuators) as *new atomic operations* for automating specific problems, requiring *new recipe techniques* for combining them. Unlike traditional programming that forces all code through one paradigm, SCP enables *computational diversity* by letting each distributed node use the most appropriate programming paradigm (Forth for real-time control, Prolog for logic, FP for data processing, OOP for state management) as specialized atomic operations, while connecting them through pure data flow rather than restrictive function calls that impose control flow protocols. The key architectural insight is *Solution Centric Program Choreography* - a hierarchical tree structure where parent nodes contain the recipe logic for coordinating child atomic operations, eliminating peer-to-peer coupling that destroys scalability. This creates a new abstraction layer where solutions are choreographed through structured data flow between specialized atomic operations, each autonomous in their execution but coordinated through hierarchical recipes rather than lateral negotiation - representing the next evolutionary step in programming's fundamental cycle of creating atoms and recipes.

📝 Join the programming simplicity Discord Server!

Check out the programming simplicity community on Discord - hang out with 25 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

📝 Solution Centric Programming

Linking Together

🗨️ Mariano Guerra:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-10

quartz: visual programming and dsp playground

🎥 playing tag with dragons

playing tag with dragons

🗨️ Ivan Reese: 📝 Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-10

New Ink & Switch essay: Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

By Geoffrey Litt, Joshua Horowitz, and Peter van Hardenberg, with photos by Todd Matthews.

Little spoiler — this essay was written in our malleable environment Patchwork, and Geoffrey created some custom tools to help him write and edit the essay, detailing the experience in the essay. Meta :)

📝 Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

🗨️ Kartik Agaram: 🎥 The Web That Never Was

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-14

An alternate history of the tech industry

I can't believe I haven't seen this 6-year old talk before.

The Web That Never Was - Dylan Beattie

AI

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-09

building an agent turned out to be surprisingly simple.

🦋 larkworthy.bsky.social:

I went through the Cline source code and wow, these agents are ultra simple! Force the AI to always call a tool. Have some special tools that delegate to the user for the interaction with the control loop. This is *it*.

<https://bsky.app/profile/larkworthy.bsky.social|@larkworthy.bsky.social>: I went through the Cline source code and wow, these agents are ultra simple! Force the AI to always call a tool. Have some special tools that delegate to the user for the interaction with the control loop. This is *it*.

Present Company

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy: 📝 Terminology: What is a "glitch" in Functional Reactive Programming / RX?

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-13

I was at programming 2025 and heard a developer struggling with glitching in reactive systems. Made me dig deeper into Observable reactivity model. I sometimes see glitching but its when I manually short circuit the dataflow graph. The actual engine is glitch free even when you put async tasks in the middle. I've properly tested it now!

📝 Terminology: What is a "glitch" in Functional Reactive Programming / RX?

What is the definition of a "glitch" in the context of Functional Reactive Programming?

I know that in some FRP frameworks "glitches" can occur while in others not. For example RX is not glitch free

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🗨️ TodePond: 🎥 Live: Live

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-14

hello i am going to do a livestream later where i watch back through every todepond tech talk ive ever given to reflect on each one. i invite you to join!

It's another todepond livestream, at 5pm London time.

Live: Live

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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Future of Coding Weekly 2025/06 Week 2

2025-06-09 00:04

🎥 Vibe code = legacy code 🤖 A computational blackboard for efficient human/AI collaboration 🧑‍💻 playb.it: communal technology

Our Work

📦 github.com/pomdtr/tweety release v2.0.0 via Achille Lacoin

Just released the tweety v2: github.com/pomdtr/tweety/releases/tag/v2.0.0

It includes the revamped tweety cli, which has access to most of the chrome extension api !

I also wrote down a new blog post about it: blog.pomdtr.me/posts/integrated-terminal

💬 Achille Lacoin

Ok last screenshot and I'll stop spamming about my project, this is just sooo fun (and a new spin on the classic "summarize this post" demo)

🗣️ Interactive visualizations in natural language using voice input in multiple languages (English and Spanish in the video). via Mariano Guerra

🎙 Look Ma! No Hands!

💎 LLM-powered Method Resolution with Synonllm via Scott

LLM-powered Method Resolution with Synonllm - I've been experimenting a lot with what new things LLMs have to offer more dynamic languages like Ruby. I'm really hooked on this idea of creating a DSL without an explicit interface, and letting users just call methods semantically and letting the LLM figure it out.

You can see kind of what I mean near the end of the video with the FileHandler class example. In that class the method names are much too long for anyone to really want to type, but that extra detail (combined with the arguments) allows the user to use the interface they'd like and have it just work. Also effectively creating method overloading / dynamic argument-based dispatch in Ruby with the help of an LLM...

📝 LLM-powered Method Resolution with Synonllm

Taking Ruby's Principle of Least Surprise to the extreme

📝 We need a formal theory of Agent Evals | Nilesh Trivedi via Nilesh Trivedi

I posted some thoughts about why Coding agents are a special computational unit that unify not just programs and ML models, but also the programmer . and we should perhaps try to unify Type Theory, Testing and ML Evals into a single framework: 📝 We need a formal theory of Agent Evals | Nilesh Trivedi

📝 Tweety - An Integrated Terminal for your Browser: Installation via Achille Lacoin

If any of you wanted to try tweety, but was intimidated by the install steps, I've significantly simplified them: github.com/pomdtr/tweety?tab=readme-ov-file#installation

I would love some feedback on them !

🎥 Service Status Extension from HTTP APIs via Mariano Guerra

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New Gloodata extension demo showing:

Service status HTTP API integration in 250 lines of Python (no LLM/UI code)
Voice input mode
Open weight model support from Cerebras (Qwen 3, Llama 4 & Llama 3.3)

📝 Pastagang: Jamming together far apart via Lu Wilson

JAMMING TOGETHER

FAR APART

pastagang.cc/paper

This is a paper about live programming, written by many many many people collaborating together in one shared document, with no one credited by name. It's getting submitted tomorrow.

Devlog Together

🤖 roboco-op via Tom Larkworthy

My next focus for lopecode is the editing experience. I've tidied most of the gitches up and its smooth, but kinda hardwork to do everything in my head. I need more hands!

So to kill 2 birds with one stone, I will redo roboco-op but this time with an agentic workflow following how Cline works. Early results is that it is quite good at following Observable dependancy graph and exposing itself to jsut enough context for the task at hand. Roboco-op was struggling with context management and I think this is a better path. It can add cells!

Roboco-op hit a ceiling because you have to manually copy and paste cells over in Observable, but with Lopecode you can add cells programatically so its a better substrate for this kinda of idea.

Thinking Together

🎥 Message Gardening in the Atmosphere with Roomy Chat via Andreas S

Message Gardening in the Atmosphere with Roomy Chat

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Hey FoC 👋

I recently stumbled upon this:

github.com/muni-town/roomy

I found it quite interesting to see how fluid you could go from thought/chat to blog/text (see attachment). Different projects related to AT Protocol are exploring different notions of communication patterns like here:

cosmik.network or here garden.co.

Cosmik employes the concept of stigmercy, something which I think would be very useful for FoC and other communities. Foc beeing trapped in SLACK for so long is cruel enough. Of course tools were build but ...

One can really see how certain preconceived notions of interaction patterns are starting to break up in interesting ways. a PKM tool is usually for personal reflection( hence the P in PKM) of course I could always take a zettel and expand it or include it in messages, which I still sometimes do. But I think there more to it. As we explorer the patterns of communication. Relating to other people, where does my - self, myself start where does -the others- start? So chat is quite a low entry barrier and a interesting start to start communicating with others.

Their project site even has a values section:

muni.town/values

I recently started using anytype.io and was surprised how good the mobile sync worked. Sharing with other people works OK. But then I tried to share a SVG file,... or I tried to create mermaid or a mindmap and view it on mobile...

Clojure clerk is a notebook for some computational stuff but I like the Idea of having snippets that can be evaluated which reminded me of projects like:

cloxp.github.io/cloxp-intro.html

lively-kernel.org

To hit the sweet spot is really not simple one wants to avoid to re-invent all of personal computing just to do some note taking and collaboration...

While researching I also found this: neurite.network I vaguely remember reading something about it here at Foc but the search did bring up anything for me..

I hope that the AT protocol related tools become mature enough such that I can use it for my own zettelkasten which is based on markdown. But I really would like to test out the other collaboration based features. What are your experiences with zettelkasten and collaboration? Could you imagine something like roomy being sufficiently good enough to finally replace SLACK for example? WDYT Ivan Reese?

🧑‍💻 playb.it: communal technology via Kartik Agaram

Anybody play with the playb.it yet? Impressions?

💬 Angus Mitchell

RFW (Request For Whiteboard) - Since Google shut down Jamboard I've been looking for a whiteboard app that...

You can log into from a web app and a mobile app (or 2 web apps) and they stay in sync with each other
Is NOT an infinite canvas
Is constrained in terms of colors, brush sizes, etc.

📝 Massive Parallelism via Paul Tarvydas

Content

🎥 Recreating Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" in Mario Paint via Ivan Reese

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One of my favourite recent youtube findings is Cat Graffam, who uses all sorts of "wrong" tools to do fine art. Every one of these videos is a combination of esoterica, hilarity, software design misery, and art theory. Good to put on in the background while you spend 20 minutes making fancy coffee, for instance.

A few favs:

Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine in the iPhone Notes app (a real nail-biter for anyone who has ever made a drawing canvas app, especially if you consider that Notes is backed by a CRDT)
Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" in Mario Paint
Caravaggio's "Judith Beheading Holofornes" in Kid Pix
Hopper's "Nighthawks" with a weird Nintendo Wii drawing tablet (the save-load UI is baffling)

(This might be less FoC-relevant for folks who aren't working on programmable drawing canvases, but… (A) there are dozens of us!, and (B) it's good software craft catharsis)

📝 Roomy Deep Dive: ATProto + Automerge via Kartik Agaram

Roomy chat looks interesting. In addition to various levels of nerding out we can do over it, it provides an interesting looking workflow for a community to go from ephemeral chat to slightly persistent threads to more timeless long-form writing.

💬 #thinking-together@2025-06-02 FoC-esque test group. You need to authenticate using a Bsky/ATproto account.

Be aware it's all alpha software so far and might get torn down at any time. But in principle even if that happens we will all have the data or the group in our browser storage :shocked_face_with_exploding_head:

📝 Roomy Deep Dive: ATProto + Automerge

A technical deep dive on how Roomy chat works, combining ATProto and Automerge to create a resource-efficient group chat.

🗃️ The US IRS open sourced its direct file system via Eli Mellen

The US IRS open sourced its direct file system . In the middle of it is a pretty fun logic engine implemented in Scala. Not too futurey, but if you are interested in logic engines at all it’s a fun bit of code spelunking.

📝 TouchDesigner via Spencer Fleming

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TouchDesigner

Just saw someone using Touch Designer

It was really neat- real time Multimedia being chained through a pipeline while every element is visually shown in real time and inspectable.

It has very cool ways of making your own UI elements as well.

Made me wonder what it would be like if instead of multimedia it was also able to be used for screen windows as a desktop environment

TouchDesigner is a node-based visual programming language for real-time interactive multimedia content. Developed by the Toronto-based company "Derivative," it's often used by artists, programmers, creative coders, software designers, and performers to create performances, installations, and fixed media works.

🎥 Vibe code = legacy code via Kartik Agaram

Steve Krouse: Vibe code = legacy code

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Present Company

💬 Ezhik

Is coding/programming/computering/beepbooping/funking of corn a hobby or a job to you? Or both? It's both for me and I'm increasingly having the two diverge. "Work" coding and "home" coding feel like two entirely different worlds.

📝 Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74 via Ezhik

Might be a good day to meditate on the HyperCard Bible...

👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

💬 Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

✉️ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

Future of Coding Weekly 2025/06 Week 1

2025-06-01 22:43

🎥 Virtual Meetup 11 • May 2025 🛸 TinyBoxer: A tiny programming system inspired by Boxer 📘 The Magic of Code

Two Minute Week

🎥 Using lopecode to a create a programmable offline-first single file audio application via Tom Larkworthy

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Dusted off an old project from 2021; a programmable audio sequencer. It stalled because there was no good way to store state in Observable, but with Lopecode, there is! Notebooks can write back into their own FileAttachments, which are bundled when exporting. So I just added some serialisation code and suddenly that project is much more useful. You can actually save the good settings as a hermetic file, completely sure that no external software changes will ever damage that moment in time. (online notebook)

Our Work

📘 The Magic of Code via Sam Arbesman

My book "The Magic of Code" is finally going to be seeing the light of day in a few weeks! And it explores a bunch of topics and ideas that I think folks here will find interesting.

🧑‍💻 OCIF Generator via Maikel van de Lisdonk

Hi,

Yesterdays awesome demo of Scrappy during the FoC meetup and the small "one more thing"-moment about integrating Scrappy with AI/LLMs, reminded me of posting something here about 2 of my own recent new side projects:

ocif-generator.vercel.app : generate OCIF files and view them as JSON/SVG/React-flow
app.prompttoform.ai : generate complex forms and play with them in the preview and also view its structure in the flow tab using react-flow. The latter is especially handy when the form contains multiple steps and has decisions in them (because you can build decision tree's with this generator).

Both tools use structured output using json schema's for the llm's, which allows for a lot of control instead of just prompting and trying to get structured output via a text prompt. Both of these tools were coded using a lot of AI as well (using Cursor).

The OCIF-generator was demoed yesterday at localfirst-conf by one of the OCWG core members @Jess Martin

My plan is to integrate both of the above with my own infinte canvas visual programming system: codeflowcanvas.io.

Check canvasprotocol.org for more info about OCIF.

📊 Gloodata: A low-code platform designed for developers. No UI or LLM code required. via Mariano Guerra

I made two demo extensions for gloodata to showcase its capabilities and how to use it to create interactive data exploration tools enabled by LLMs, here they are:

Our World in Data Demography & Fertility Explorer with DuckDB
- 🎥 Demo
- 🧑‍💻 Extension Repo
GitHub Repository Explorer with SQLite
- 🎥 Demo
- 🧑‍💻 Extension Repo

📝 The case for using a web browser as your terminal via Achille Lacoin

I've written a little something on why I use a web browser as my terminal emulator

📝 Purpose of Programming Languages via Paul Tarvydas

🧑‍💻 Tweety: An integrated terminal for your browser via Achille Lacoin

I'm working on converting tweety to a chrome extension (as it is much more secure), and it opens some cool new usecases.

Ex: querying the chrome extension api from the shell !

Devlog Together

💬 Ivan Reese

In a visual programming environment, points (like, x/y[/z/...] positions) are as important as strings are in a textual environment.

If a visual programming environment doesn't have fantastic affordances for working with points, I can't take it seriously.

Thinking Together

💬 Scott