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Future of Coding Weekly 2023/03 Week 1
2023-03-05 23:21
🤖 LLM Assistants for Complex Interfaces ⚖️ Rules as Code 🎥 List App, Structured Editor & Glueing ChatGPT Demos
Our Work
📢 VL/HCC 2023 (IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing) via Rebecca Krosnick
May be of interest to Future of Coding folks as a way to get feedback or share your work.
VL/HCC 2023 (IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing) is currently soliciting papers (abstracts due April 21, papers due April 28).
🤖 LLM Powered Assistants for Complex Interfaces via Nick Arner
Wrote something recently on the idea of using LLMs as part of in-the-loop software assistants
⚖️ Blawx: A user-friendly web-based tool for Rules as Code via Jason Morris
Here's a little gif of the new scenario editor in the version 1.4 of Blawx I released today. It allows the user to make fully-, partially-, or un-ground statements that are true, false, or unknown , answers the query with natural language explanations that set out the assumptions being used for unknowns, and then recommends additional fact statements that would be relevant to finding additional conclusions that are not based on assumptions. It's aimed at encoding statutes and regulations in such a way as to allow those encodings to be made, or at least validated, by lawyers and other non-programmers. Feedback welcome. github.com/Lexpedite/blawx. The new release is up at dev.blawx.com now.
🎥 NoCode ChatGPT API: Send interesting facts to slack on a schedule via Mariano Guerra
I just integrated the newly announced ChatGPT API into GlooData, here's a video showing how to use it to schedule slack messages with interesting facts about home appliances.
📱 List App - Demo via Josh Justice
Hey folks, I have been hanging around Future-of-Code-like communities for a few years, trying to figure out what I want my focus to be. I’ve finally figured it out, and I made a demo video to share with y’all about what I’m working on.
It’s a web and mobile app for tracking your personal information, including allowing end users to configure buttons and actions to customize their workflow. It’s not groundbreaking research, but it does enable end users to create interactive software anywhere they are. I’ve been able to replace at least four apps I previously used with “boards” I’ve configured in this app. I plan to open-source it and set up a free open-registration server soon.
Here’s the demo if anyone would like to take a look!
Thinking Together
What do you do to motivate yourself to update documentation? I have so much of it that it is now a significant undertaking to keep it up to date with the tool, and I am losing interest. I'm trying to figure out whether I should just tag most of it as out-of-date and come back to it later when there are enough users to justify it...
💬 Niall McCormack
What's the general consensus on node based scripting?
I'm intrigued by Unreal's Blueprint node based scripting tools - they seem easy to use, but if you want to do anything complex then (for me) it becomes very messy very quickly. However with the general move in the past 10 years or so to more functional programming and serverless etc then perhaps it makes sense. Small components that can be wired together visually feels easy , or right ?
Darklang is another example with extrapolates the complexities of the underlying system allowing you to just write some pseudo node based (at least when I last looked at it) components that are easily wired up together.
I'm an iOS engineer by trade, and it feels that something like Darklang / node based coding could end up matching nicely with SwiftUI's declarative syntax for UI.
🎥 "Ceptre: A Language for Modeling Generative Interactive Systems" by Chris Martens via Paul Tarvydas
Multi-single-tasking:
Brainstorming, half-baked...
I would have ignored Ceptre in the past. It claims to be a language for writing games. The very idea makes me yawn. But, one of the guys at the Torlisp monthly meetup is deeply into robotics and Scheme and another guy, in the film industry, uses Racket for hobbying in game programming. My own interest is in concurrency and simplicity and compiler-writing. These fields are all related. Watching the 2015 Strangeloop presentation about Ceptre piqued my interest. Ceptre is logic programming, but with a twist - it has a built-in notion of explicit ordering. I thought that I could knock off a better game language using my diagrams of state machines. I continued to learn about Ceptre. Aside: Ohm-JS has built-in explicit ordering and is “not” context-free. I have to wonder if Ceptre is to generalized formalism as PEG (Ohm-JS) is to context-free grammar formalisms.
Dunno yet.
Content
🐦 Tweet from @garybernhardt via Chris Knott
🐦 Gary Bernhardt: 1960s: "COBOL will let non-programmers make the software!"
1980s: "4GLs will let non-programmers make the software!"
2000s: "UML will let non-programmers make the software!"
2020s: "AI will let non-programmers make the software!"
Devlog Together
Thinking about building some visual programming tools after taking a break for a while. One fun idea that popped up: hybrid text + node-wire environment where you can ~wire to the text~ . Like, a word in the text can act as a node. Probably been done somewhere, but I haven't seen it, so I'm kinda jamming on the thought. Like, what if Natto but you exploded the frames, brought some of Bret's Tangle in there, little bit of that style of annotating an image+paragraph by coloring a word the same as a corresponding thing in the image. Constants in the text live-update, etc etc.
FWIW - here’s how I think about it... You are programming a MACHINE. Every bit of syntax has to DO something (have a meaning). [The meaning of comments is “to be ignored by the machine”. A lot of other syntactic baubles have that same meaning - e.g. stick people and clouds]. What does it mean to connect a wire to a word? What happens if you connect that same wire to a different word?
Hi friends! This is my first time posting in the devlog, but here's today's progress on my structured editor -- autocomplete for object attribute access!
trying out "file attachment" as a first-class AST node type
🎥 Attach