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Future of Coding Weekly 2023/03 Week 3
2023-03-19 23:07
🌱 Moldable Live Programming 🤖 FoC LLM Usage 📢 London FoC Meetup 📄 Live Rich and Composable Programming Beyond Text
Two Minute Week
🎥 Async & Await Effects via Peter Saxton
Warning: more than 2 minutes this week. However working out how to implement Async/Await as effect handlers has been a real head scratcher and here I try and walk through what I have ended up with.
Our Work
🌱🐦 Tweet from @jackrusher via Jack Rusher
We've just published our first academic paper about Clerk, in case anyone's interested:
🐦 Jack Rusher in Tokyo 🇯🇵: We (@mkvlr @unkai and myself) are in Tokyo to present our paper ‘Clerk: Moldable Live Programming for Clojure’ at Programming 23’s Programming Experience Workshop (PX23).
Of course we wrote the paper with Clerk and published it with Garden:
https://px23.clerk.vision
Thinking Together
🤖💬 Ivan Lugo
This is an incredibly thinky group of folks. I’m wondering how, if at all, this little community has been using these LLMs and advanced chat bots. People are playing Pokemon in a text/CLI form just by asking “let’s play pokemon but with text and skip all the boring parts”*. I have to conclude that a number of you folks have made some crazy strides in the work you’ve been doing or how you’ve been refining your ideas with these tools.
📢🐦 Tweet from @Mappletons via Mariano Guerra
If you are near London you can think together in person!
🐦 Maggie Appleton: The next edition of the London Future of Coding meet-up is on for the evening of April 8th at @nwspk!
Made for end-user programming enthusiasts, computing history nerds, and dissatisfied coders.
Come hang out, talk shop, and show off your side projects. April Future of Coding Meetup
Content
🐦 Tweet from @nacmartin via Mariano Guerra
Move your fingers in the air to interact with a computer
🐦 Nacho Martín: After 20 years I can finally build this interface :D!!☝☝
How it works: human (me) moves fingers->webcam records fingers->AI (Google's MediaPipe) recognizes fingers and gestures->human interacts with web elements.
Link to the code in the next tweet:
🎥 Languages for programming: From punched cards to wise computing | Prof. David Harel via Christopher Shank
📄📝 Live, Rich, and Composable: Qualities for Programming Beyond Static Text via João Araújo
🐦 Tweet from @Aidan_Wolf via Mattia Fregola
🐦 aidan: there's a device in development by @Humane that combines laser projection and advanced AI recognition
sounds like a low-fi context-based AR device and I'm here for it
Devlog Together
Can’t believe I just found this channel after all this time in the server…been doing a bit of “building in public” on my Twitter, but it just goes into the void…but this community never fails to disappoint 🙂
Today’s update: 🎥 Just got offline mode to work in Subset!
Finished my rewrite of the layout & rendering engine, here's a taste of what the syntax looks & feels like:
tonight's progress: selections! almost done w/ the "normal" interactions that one would expect from an editor, and then I can move on to the more fun ones 🎉. Too often projectional editors jump straight to the tricks without providing the things that plain text gives you for free.
Present Company
Are note-taking apps "too mutable"?
When I'm working on a page of notes (to develop my ideas or knowledge about a topic), I'll typically edit it for a few days, after which it tends to "congeal" into something that is too big to keep working on. My compulsion is then to refactor the page into several new pages, keeping the ideas that seem "good" and deleting or deprecating the ideas that turned out to be "bad". But refactoring my notes tends to take a fair amount of time, and I'm not sure it's worth the cost. There's a reasonable chance I will never read the notes again, because what was valuable about the note-writing was the ideas that developed in my mind as I was writing them .
The exercise had value. But the notes resulting from the exercise may not have much value.
Thus, I've begun to wonder whether I would appreciate a note-taking app that locks you out of your old notes . Perhaps this happens if you haven't touched a note for a few days, or maybe it happens overnight, every night.
Immutable notes aren't a new idea. Humans have been writing immutable notes ever since they started carving glyphs into stone.
Computers have given us the ability to endlessly edit a page of text. But maybe having mutable pages is detrimental, for many kinds of note-taking.
Food for thought 🤔.
(A shower thought after yet another morning finding and fixing bugs in my own apps.)
Today some big companies can make apps with shitty logic, poor reliability and bad UX.
Today some developers can make little apps with shitty logic, poor reliability and bad UX. (Occasionally slightly better UX if they're open to designer input.)
I hope recent AI advances empower designers to build little apps with shitty logic, poor reliability and half-decent UX.