Christopher Galtenberg 2021-05-24 02:01:58 "Narrative Intelligence Lab in the Computer Science Department at the University of New Orleans is a highly interdisciplinary research group that investigates how computers can use narrative to interact more naturally with people"
http://games.cs.uno.edu
Lists of interesting papers there:
Elie Joseph Cartan 2021-05-24 14:56:41 I don’t know if this has been shared here already, but I think many here will strongly align with the spirit of the Beautiful Software research group - a part of the broader Building Beauty course of Christopher Alexanders works. The 2nd cohort begins in the fall of 2021.
https://www.buildingbeauty.org/beautiful-software
Breck Yunits 2021-05-24 22:04:11 "Software code is unsuitable way to express Domain Knowledge."
Breck Yunits 2021-05-24 22:05:08 Found this amazing video after going down a rabbit hole thanks to a lead from @Mark Somerville
Konrad Hinsen 2021-05-25 07:21:45 I am not a fan of this hype-style "a radical new software approach", but fundamentally I agree and I have made similar arguments to refactor scientific software into scientific knowledge and tool engineering (https://f1000research.com/articles/3-101/v2). It's of course more easily said than done.
William Taysom 2021-05-25 08:26:02 I've been following Spivak for some time. His more recent book is a nicer read https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S9FS8NH/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0. (Mentioned in some other thread maybe a day ago.) Ologs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olog are getting fairly far from his current thinking. Poly is his favorite category for modeling things these days. Recently had a fairly mathy talk about it. As desert at the end, he describes the game of life https://youtu.be/Cp5_o2lDqj0?t=3138. It's still far from being useful for non-category theorists.
Minus notation and jargon, what's the take-away from his work? It's hard to put precisely what makes this kind of formalism nicer than other typical mathy definitions. I guess part of it is that if you understand this formalism, you can see all kinds of tweaks that would lead to other interesting automata whereas a normal set theoretical approach is less productive in that way. Its easier for a tweak to break things rather than to lead to something new and interesting.
Don Abrams 2021-05-25 11:11:32 From what I can tell, the much simpler Ologs are sufficient for describing what was done, but if there are choices built into the model, then you may need the much more complex Poly model (since it’s essentially combinatorial as you make choices)
I believe both are great frameworks for making models that embed domain knowledge outside of code in a way that can be graphically viewed and composed
The math is intense though…
em 2021-05-26 06:24:22 This thread is fascinating! Are there any examples of real-world domains modeled through any of these (or similar) techniques, where mathematical formalisms proved useful?
Konrad Hinsen 2021-05-26 07:44:38 Interesting references, thanks @William Taysom!
I'll add a more historical one: the earliest detailed discussion of computation in domain notations is a 1979 article by Terry Winograd: https://doi.org/10.1145/359131.359133. Winograd distinguishes between the "subject domain" (what we tend to call just "domain" today), the "domain of interaction" (basically UI) and the "domain of implementation" (code).
Florian Schulz 2021-05-25 13:35:56 The Computer Chronicles - Programming Languages (1990)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcrmLfQx_to&t=730s
Featuring: “The rise of object-oriented programming” including Turbo Pascal, SmallTalk, Actor, C++, ObjectiveC, ProGraph, FrameMaker, HyperCard, …
Jean-Louis Villecroze 2021-05-27 15:23:03 I ❤ how much more polish the NeXT experience was at that time compared to Windows / DOS
Florian Schulz 2021-05-26 07:09:07 https://blokdots.com
Following that interest, > https://olivierbrueckner.de/> , who studied industrial design at the time, did some extracurricular experiences in interaction design. During this time, a lot of interaction design students, as well as industrial design students, came up to him, asking for help. They needed support connecting components like buttons or writing a couple of lines of code, e.g., to let an LED pulse—relatively simple stuff for experienced people, yet hard for absolute beginners.
In 2017 Olivier based his bachelor thesis on bridging the gap between the two disciplines. Based on his experiences with the students looking for help, he designed a tool to create hardware prototypes easily—blokdots was born.
Shubhadeep Roychowdhury 2021-05-27 13:23:25 Shubhadeep Roychowdhury 2021-05-28 06:16:18 Yeah. Seemed interesting to me as well. Did not look a lot though.
Ivan Reese 2021-05-27 15:22:49 https://www.polygon.com/22455395/game-builder-garage-nintendo-preview-impressions-switch-programming
This visual programming language is infected with Nintendo’s cutesy vibes. Nodes aren’t simply machines designed to do your bidding, they’re characters with their own personalities. For example, one node counts numbers generated by other nodes. While many of the other nodes were pleasant or soft-spoken, the counter node spoke in all capital letters, signaling its excitement while it told jokes about integers and numbers.
Harry Brundage 2021-05-27 16:19:25 thought this talk on Noria which is a dataflow engine that partially materializes outputs while speaking MySQL was really good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVv9Pik6QGY similar to Materialize if y'all are familiar with it
Mariano Guerra 2021-05-27 19:04:28 Jacob Sandlund 2021-05-30 15:52:58 Thanks! It’s been so long I had to refresh my memory. Also want to eat some pancakes now…
