I love how one of the resources is "Steve Krouse's Twitter followers"

I'm actually going to follow him for this very reason 😆

Explain more. What's not "productive" here? The anti web3 sentiment?

Hi Ivan 👋. Yes I think that, as expressed by Lefteris many people see people like Guido ( Programming language Thought leaders) as a kind of Idol, which may not be wise for one thing. On the other hand one could say it would be totally fine for Guido to declare: I have no interest in a discussion about social narratives which involve web3. Which is quite a different thing then the fireball he mentions.

It may be easy to fall for the trap of technical assumptions or presuppositions regarding web3, which is by this point pretty useless since web3 is used in such a broad context. But because it is a broad context it means it has become a kind of social - cultural narrative. As such I think it could be far more interesting in viewing it from a co-creative perspective: what kind of expectations do I have towards web3? What kind of technology I would love to see in web3 ? What kind of role could a programming language and its community(python here) play in the process of finding and living better technological/social narratives.

Does that make sense or was it too abstract?

That makes sense. I just didn't want to jump to conclusions about what part of this was not productive.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

Someone showed me this today ^ an interesting list of disasters; but I also find the site design pleasing; old school but also very easy to use.

Andreas S it looks ok to me that person declares personal view. And it is not ok that other people could not think for themselves

I like that that site Chris Maughan shows a flaming dollar value in the lower right. Here's a spitball: web3 could be a compelling way to spur degrowth by reducing liquidity and cooling markets. What a delightful can of worms that would be.

Update: Whoa! You only have to go back as far as March 8th, 2022 to get to $1bn in losses / fraud.

(Just in case my earlier "what part of this was not productive" and my 2nd comment aren't clear — I think web3 / crypto is an abject failure.)

I feel the tech is amazing, but I don't know how it can be 'fixed' to be safe. There was a recent 'hack' where a new coin was being issued to all holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs; based on how many a user held. An enterprising programmer used a flash-loan contract on a blockchain to 'borrow' a large amount of ETH, bought some NFTs with the loan, claimed the coins he was due given his ownership of the NFTs, returned the NFTs and the money, and pocketed the coins; all within a few seconds. IIRC, the coins were worth about a million dollars. On the one hand, fair play; that's clever (and totally 'legal'). On the other hand, there are probably thousands of similar exploits just waiting to be done.

Putting financial systems in the hands of programmers who can't write bug-free code seems like madness; however cool the tech!

I think it is a failure to the degree that the more prevailing opinion streams in web3 simply show us, in some sense, what we are. this is it this is the current level of social, technological and economic narrative. Money in the old sense plays a big role here since money and advertising are closely related. Many narratives violently promoted simply reflect old and not very well reflected assumptions about money and how we grow our relationships around it. In that sense when I'm concerned about how people talk about it in public I refer to the spaces that are very much in spirit of what we call here convivial computing and living. Computing as part of that. Remember our discussions about cooperatives? For me web3 is simply also a space where people explore these ideas.

Web3 is also a lesson in humility for those programmers that think - wrongly so like any other isolated group of a society - that it can remove the relationships of human trust without negative consequences. But the old ways of handling money also involved many negative aspects due to certain asymmetric monopolies. And I see a large portion of value of web3 about experiments around these new forms of cooperation ( experiments with money). Complaining about the safety of these experiments is complicated because they intend ( also but not only) to reinvent the safety nets people are complaining that are missing for these experiments.

I really appreciate those thoughts, Andreas S. That's a much more substantial framing than what I got from your initial post. Thanks for writing that.

Why does the narrative matter to you? If there's some worth to further exploring web3 / crypto, why not just do that? Why not just build the thing that's good and prove the narrative wrong? Or at least work to spotlight efforts that point to the unique value of web3?

(I'm looking at this issue from the analogous perspective of someone who believes that the hypothetical potential of visual programming is undervalued by the prevailing narrative around it)

In other words, why draw people's attention to the 'bad' narrative (as you did in your initial post), rather than just minimize it and instead direct people's attention to things that are exciting and valuable?

You are right Ivan most of the time I’m doing just that and it’s going actually pretty good. Discord and it’s alternatives play a role here. I guess it was that relation from guido with a programming community which related it back for me to Future of coding here.

In that sense im grateful for reminding me on just this: not to spend too much time on the critiques but more on building. That said discussion culture is something very dear to me and I always hope that we find ways to have discussions even if we not agree about everything 👌

lol I have similar thoughts about Python and fire

This paper is such a mainstay that I got curious to see if we'd discussed it before. Surprisingly not, though this super early thread smushes it together with some other interesting ideas: http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/thinking-together/1541752846.108200.html

Kartik Agaram I love that you built your own FoC slack history tool.

🙂 Those who can't do shave yaks.

It's for everyone, though. Just like Mariano's.

A lot of naked yaks in this slack

Not sure why YouTube picked that Scratch slide as the most important slide (I guess it’s colourful?) but it’s not really about Scratch.

Thanks for the share! 🙂

The talk is from, what, a year ago? I'm sure we'd love to see any new demos.

I also have this talk from September: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euRZDSOWdE0 which is further along and after I switched from JavaScript to Python as the base language.

The prototype is even further along now - getting much more usable/smooth and a more complete implementation of Python language features. 🙂

We don’t have a live/production version of it yet, so I can’t really share it around, but DM me if you’re keen to meet over a ~1h video call to complete a coding task while we watch you and make notes on which parts of the UX don’t work (we would want to record it too). 🙂 We’re testing on a wide range of coding ability and familiarity (or unfamiliarity) with Python.

Otherwise, if you sign up to the mailing list at splootcode.io - we’re hoping to start sending invitations to groups of people from the mailing list to be early beta testers in a few months time. (There’s a few key things we learned from the user tests that we need to nail down first).

Yes I already signed up on the mailing list. Happy to be a UX guinea pig.

Wow I never saw this before it's really good! I'll definitely give it a go

https://github.com/katharosada/splootcode

VERY impressive. I'm using Blockly for declarative logic programming, (speaking at the Blockly conference in 2 weeks) and I've been looking for a way to integrate this kind of text-completion method on top of the drag-and-drop interface. You've solved that problem completely. I only wish I knew how to duplicate the REPL experience in the language I'm using. Need to research that. Are languages and blocks modularized out in SplootCode, so I could theoretically create the blocks and code generation tools necessary to do logic programming (without the run/feedback features)? And just out of curiosity, have you considered the possibility of bi-directional translation, to ease people into being able to type the code themselves? TIA!

It's designed to have UI components that are reusable across different languages. So it can be adapted to another language, you need to implement a SplootNode subclass for each type of block (e.g. if, variable reference, operator) and implement a function or two that generate autocomplete suggestions for each node type. The nodetree then serialises to a nested Json object structure that you can use in your own compile/execution.

So yeah, it is designed to be adapted to new languages but I've not put any effort into making this easy for people other than myself, and the APIs aren't stable. I can help answer questions if you're keen to give it a shot though!

Because the underlying tree structure is basically the python AST it can in theory do bi-directional translation and I have code for that which I used in my tests. I've only got a subset of python supported though so importing from text code is not good enough to include in the UI yet. Also it would never be good at round-tripping because it'd lose all formatting and some syntax choices that generate the same AST. It's not a specific goal of the project to roundtrip with text.

As the last remaining daily user of CoffeeScript, the idea that a "CoffeeTalk" could hypothetically exist makes me swoon.

Hoo boy, that's one sweet title.

Quote from the article: "And in my darkest moments, I can imagine a 2015 in which everyone is constantly connected to a global network of computers, but the whole system is designed to show us ads and spy on us."

Kartik Agaram Have you read that book? It's pretty wild

Kartik Agaram Eric Gade - Nice to see others who've read it. I always think of it when I see eyes on ancient things! As I recall, it didn't mention Easter Island? If true, very odd.

(the title is why I'm in this thread, not the topic, sorry!)

Have to say that Job's computer as a "bicycle for the mind" is a terrible metaphor

I just read OP. The section on frameworks is particularly powerful stuff.

If a framework allows people to be productive even when they barely understand how to program, then the system works! If some people are content remaining at that level of expertise, that’s their prerogative. And if they outgrow the framework — well, that doesn’t mean that the framework was bad, its just not > for them> anymore. We don’t need to perpetuate the “rot your brain” canard; no matter how many times you repeat this, Dijkstra’s still gonna think you’re an idiot because you didn’t learn by writing proofs.