Alexander Repenning created AgentSheets, an environment to help kids develop computational thinking skills. It wrapped an unusual computational model with an even more unusual user interface. The result was divisive. It inspired so many other projects, whilst being rejected at every turn and failing to catch on the way Scratch later did. So in 2017…

If you're anything like Ivan (oof, sorry), you've heard of Pygmalion but never caught more than the gist. Some sort of project from the early 70s, similar to Sketchpad or Smalltalk or something, yet another promising prototype from the early history of our field that failed to take the world by storm. Our stock-in-trade on this show. But you've pro…

Inventing on Principle Stop Drawing Dead Fish The Future of Programming Yes, all three of them in one episode. Phew! Links $ patreon.com/futureofcoding — Lu and Jimmy recorded an episode about Hest without telling me, and by total coincidence released it on my birthday. Those jerks… make me so happy. Lu's talk at SPLASH 2023: Cellpond: Spatial Prog…

Dave Ackley's paper Beyond Efficiency is three pages long. With just these three pages, he mounts a compelling argument against the conventional way we engineer software. Instead of inflexibly insisting upon correctness, maybe allow a lil slop? Instead of chasing peak performance with cache and clever tricks, maybe measure many times before you cut…

In the spirit of clearly communicating what you're signing up for, this podcast episode is nearly three hours long, and among other things it contains a discussion of a paper by author Mary Shaw titled Myths & Mythconceptions which takes as an organizing principle a collection of myths that are widely believed by programmers, largely unacknowledged…

The subject of this episode's paper — Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler — is one of those grand ideas that makes you want to go stargazing. To stare out into space and just disassociate from your body and become one with the heavens. Everything — life, space, time, existence — all of it is a joke! A cosmic ribbing delivered by the laws of the …

Go To Statement Considered Harmful is a solid classic entry in the X Considered Harmful metafiction genre, authored by renowned computer scientist and idiosyncratic grump, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra. Surprisingly (given the impact it's had) this is a minuscule speck of a paper, lasting only 1-ish pages, and it even digresses several times from the main p…

This community is a big tent. We welcome folks from all backgrounds, and all levels of experience with computers. Heck, on our last episode, we celebrated an article written by someone who is, rounding down, a lawyer! A constant question I ponder is: what's the best way to introduce someone to the world of FoC? If someone is a workaday programmer, …

The execution of code, by its very nature, creates the conditions of a "strong legalism" in which you must unquestioningly obey laws produced without your say, invisibly, with no chance for appeal. This is a wild idea; today's essay is packed with them. In drawing parallels between law and computing, it gives us a new skepticism about software and …

This is a normal episode of a podcast called Future of Coding. We talk about INTERCAL, a real tool for computer programming. [Do I need to say more? Will this sell it? Most people won’t have heard of INTERCAL, but I think the fake out “normal” is enough to draw their attention. Also, I find “computer programming” funny. Not sure why I put that in q…

Out of the Tar Pit is in the grand pantheon of great papers, beloved the world over, with just so much influence. The resurgence of Functional Programming over the past decade owes its very existence to the Tar Pit’s snarling takedown of mutable state, championed by Hickey & The Cloj-Co. Many a budding computational philosophizer — both of yours tr…

Jimmy and I have each read this paper a handful of times, and each time our impressions have flip-flopped between "hate it so much" and "damn that's good". There really are two sides to this one. Two reads, both fair, both worth discussing: one of them within "the frame", and one of them outside "the frame". So given that larger-than-normal surface…

This is Jimmy’s favourite paper! Here’s a copy someone posted on HitBug. Is it as good as the original? Likely not! Ivan also enjoyed this Theory Building business immensely; don’t be fooled by the liberal use of the “blonk” censor-tone to cover the galleon-hold of swearwords he let slip, those mostly pertain to the Ryle. For the next episode, we’r…

Before the time-travelling talks, the programmable rooms, the ladders and rocket launchers, we had the first real Bret Victor essay: Magic Ink. It set the stage for Bret's later explorations, breaking down the very idea of "software" into a few key pieces and interrogating them with his distinct focus, then clearly demoing a way we could all just d…

Following our previous episode on Richard P. Gabriel's Incommensurability paper, we're back for round two with an analysis of what we've dubbed the Worse is Better family of thought products: The Rise of Worse Is Better by Richard P. Gabriel Worse is Better is Worse by Nickieben Bourbaki Is Worse Really Better? by Richard P. Gabriel Next episode, w…

Today we're discussing the so-called "incommensurability" paper: The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel. In the pre-show, Jimmy demands that Ivan come right out and explain himself, and so he does, to a certain extent at least. In the post-show, Jimmy draws such a thick line between programming and philosophy that …

There once was a podcast episode. It was about a very special kind of book: the Dynabook. The podcast didn't know whether to be silly, or serious. Jimmy offered some thoughtful reflections, and Ivan stung him on the nose. Sponsored by Replit.com, who want to give you some reasons not to join Replit, and Theatre.js, who want to make beautiful tools …

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Jimmy Miller joins the show as co-host. Together, we embark on a new series of episodes covering the most influential and interesting papers in the history of our field. Some of these papers led directly to where we are today, and their influence cannot be overstated. Others were overlooked or unloved in their day, and we revive them out of curiosi…

Today's guest is Ella Hoeppner, who first came onto the radar of our community back in the fall when she released a web-based visual Clojure editor called Vlojure, with a captivating introduction video. I was immediately interested in the project because of the visual style on display — source code represented as nested circles; an earthy brown ins…

Scott Anderson has spent the better part of a decade working on end-user programming features for VR and the metaverse. He's worked on playful creation tools in the indie game Luna, scripting for Oculus Home and Horizon Worlds at Facebook, and a bunch of concepts for novel programming interfaces in virtual reality. Talking to Scott felt a little bi…

The name Replit will be familiar to regular listeners of our show. The backstory and ambitions behind the project, however, I bet will be news to you. Amjad Masad, the founder and first programmer of Replit, is interviewed by Steve Krouse in this episode from the vault — recorded back in 2019, released for the first time today. Amjad shares the sto…

In this episode, I'll be talking to Toby Schachman, who many of you are surely familiar with thanks to an incredible string of projects he's released over the past decade, including Recursive Drawing back in 2012, Apparatus in 2015, and most recently Cuttle which opened to the public this past week. All of these projects superficially appear to be …

Mary Rose Cook is a programmer with.. just.. so many side projects, oh my — and, she works at Airtable. Mary created Gitlet, a version of Git in 1000 lines of JavaScript with extensive annotation. That might be her most well-known project, but of particular interest to our community are her programming environments Isla and Code Lauren. These proje…

Ravi Chugh is a (recently-tenured 🎉) prof at the University of Chicago. He’s famous for leading the Sketch-n-Sketch project, an output-directed, bidirectional programming tool that lets you seamlessly jump back and forth between coding and directly manipulating your program’s output. The tool gives you two different projected editing interfaces for…

"Metaphors are important here." There's a small handful of people that I've been requested again and again to interview on the Future of Coding podcast. Jennifer Jacobs is one of those people. Her work on Dynamic Brushes in particular, and parametric drawing in general, occupies a major intersection between disciplines and provides insights that we…

Miller Puckette created "The Patcher" Max (the precursor to Max/MSP), and later Pure Data, two of the most important tools in the history of visual programming and computer music. Max was designed by Miller in the mid-1980s as an aid to computer-music composers who wanted to build their own dynamic systems without needing write C code. Max had no f…

This was originally meant to be a little mini-episode halfway through March, with the next full episode coming at the start of April. Would you believe me if I told you that some things happened in the world that caused me to change my plans? Shocker, I know. Well, it's finally here. In today's episode, I'll reflect and commentate on the results of…

Orca is a visual programming environment for making music. Except it's not graphical, it's just text arranged in a grid. Except it doesn't actually make music, it just silently emits digital events across time. When you first see it, it's utterly alien. When you start to learn how it works and why, the logic of it all snaps into place, and it becom…

We live in a world that is gradually becoming more closed off, more controlled, more regional. Our relationship with technology is now primarily one of consumption, buying new hardware on a regular cycle, using software conceptualized to meet a market need and fulfill promises made to venture capitalists. It's common to hear people talk about both …

Last Monday, Ellen Chisa and Paul Biggar unveiled Dark, a new web-based programming environment for creating backend web services. In these conversations, first with Ellen and then with Paul, we discuss how they met, conceived of the idea, iterated on the product, and what their long-term vision is for the product. Dark is a web-based, structured e…

"The world's been divided into people who can make software, and the people who use software all day, and basically we think that that paradigm is not a good one. It feels kind of broken," says Lane Shackleton, Head of Product at Coda, where they are building a new kind of document that blurs the line between users and programmers. A Coda document …

Ivan Reese guest hosts. I've been intimidated by Jack Rusher from the first blush. I mean, he's wearing a high-collared fur coat and black sunglasses in his Twitter pic, and his bio includes "Bell Labs Researcher". So when tasked with choosing a subject for my first interview, I immediately reached out to him, leaning in to my nervousness. His repl…

This episode explores the intersections between various flavors of math and programming, and the ways in which they can be mixed, matched, and combined. Michael Arntzenius, "rntz" for short, is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham building a programming language that combines some of the best features of logic, relational, and functional p…

Usually when we think of mathematics and programming languages, we think of tedious, didactic proofs that have nothing to do with our day to day experience of programming. And when we think of developer tools, we picture the practical, imperfect tools we use every day: text editors, build systems, libraries, etc. Cyrus Omar is new computer science …

Hillel Wayne is a technical writer and consultant on a variety of formal methods, including TLA+ and Alloy. In this episode, Hillel gives a whirlwind tour of the 4 main flavors of formal methods, and explains which are practical today and which we may have to wait patiently for. The episode begins with a very silly joke from Steve (about a radioact…

Jonathan Edwards is an independent researcher working on drastically simplifying programming for beginners. He is known for his Subtext series of programming language experiments and his Alarming Development blog. He has been a researcher at MIT CSAIL and CDG/HARC. He tweets @jonathoda. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding …

Tudor Girba builds tools and techniques for improving the productivity and happiness of software teams. He currently works on the Glamorous Toolkit, a "moldable development environment" for Pharo, that developers can easily adopt to suit their needs. Tudor is a self-proclaimed "software environmentalist", sounding the alarm about how quickly we cre…

Vlad Magdalin is the CEO & co-founder of Webflow, a WYSIWYG website builder and CMS that's a thin layer of abstratction over HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this conversation we discussed Vlad's Bret Victor origin story, the differences between live programming and direct manipulation, and why web design has resisted direct manipulation pro tools for…

Katherine Ye is a PhD student at CMU, where she works on representation, including programming languages, visualizations, notations, and interfaces to enable thinking and creating. She's been affiliated with MIT CSAIL, Princeton, Distill at Google Brain, and the Recurse Center. In this conversation we discuss Penrose, her project to _democraize vis…

If you haven’t been following my research journey, this episode is a great place to join! I recap of who I am, where I come from, what I’m trying to accomplish, and how I hope to accomplish it. The mission of this project is, broadly, to “democratize” programming. My new phrase is: Enable all people to modify they software they use in the course of…

Quinn Slack of Sourcegraph believes in low-hanging fruit. Before we improve programming in all the fancy ways, he has a list of all the little improvements and features we need to make available to all developers, such as jump-to-definition, autocomplete, and automatic formatting. In this conversation, we learn about the technical challenges to bri…

Two years ago, Nadia Eghbal "stumbled onto the internet's biggest blindspot": sustainability of open-source. Her Ford Foundation report "Roads and Bridges" became an instant classic. She shined a light on the underappreciated roles of maintainers and how difficult it was for even vital projects to get enough funding for a single person full time. I…

How do we maintain millions of lines of code? For example, the Social Security Administration has 60-million-lines of COBOL. James Koppel is building tools to help tame these kinds of beasts. His current work is on decreasing the costs to build developer tools by allowing the same tool to work on a variety of languages. James Koppel is a Carnegie M…

My research recap episodes are back! This is the first I've recorded since the end of 2017. I discuss my new mentor-mentee relationship with Jonathan Edwards, my upcoming new paper on functional reactive programming, my move to London, my longer-term goals, and other various musings about abstractions, monads, and data ninja playgrounds. futureofco…

Many of you have heard about Dynamicland, Bret Victor's new project. Omar Rizwan comes on the podcast this week to tell us all about it. He recently wrote an amazing write up about it, [Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit](https://rsnous.com/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/), that I'd highly reccomend to everyone interested in the future of computin…

David K Piano is bringing explicit software modeling to the web with his xstate library. He gives talks around the world about statecharts, and is cooking up a new SaaS service that will help developers model and understand their application using statecharts. In this conversation, David and I discuss the benefits of declarative languages, such as …

Glen Chiacchieri has worked at the MIT Media Lab on Scratch, at Dynamicland with Bret Victor, and is now becoming a psychotherapist. He's known for his Legible Mathematics essay, his Flowsheets programming prototypes, and the Laser Socks game, among many other projects. In this conversation, we discuss: how he grounds his research in compassion, th…

Kevin Lynagh is a designer specializing in user interfaces for complex systems. He co-created Subform, a CAD-inspired UI design tool, with Ryan Lucas, which got a thousand backers on Kickstarter. He recently created Sketch.systems, an interactive playground for designing system behavior using Statecharts (hierarchical state machines). In this conve…

Do you hate Makefiles and YAML config files? Do you feel your soul slowly dying as you wait for your tests to run? Do you yearn for even-more-continuous integration? Nick Santos, the CTO and founder of Windmill Engineering, is here to help. Windmill's a cloud-based build-system that intelligently runs your relevant tests in the cloud, in parallel o…