Lu Wilson 2023-04-03 18:27:23 "A Caret for Your Thoughts: Adapting Caret (T) Navigation to Visual Editors" by Elliot Evans
I chatted with Elliot a while back about this so it's great to see it in action!
Really cool to see explorations in how to "bridge" different styles of programming together!
youtu.be/r--d5XlUyT4
Tak Tran 2023-04-03 20:27:18 Oh that’s a great model for thinking about accessible keyboard navigation on webpages 🌟
Tak Tran 2023-04-03 20:40:39 Unreal Engine are looking to release a new language, Verse, that is halfway between their visual programming language, Blueprint, and C++. Text-first, concurrency first and typed. They are framing it as a metaverse native language, that they hope to open source and standardise (port to other game environments like Unity, roblox etc too). I’m interested to see what a concurrency first language will look like from such a large player in the games industry. Seems like it’d be popular in the indie dev space (I’m starting to look into learning UE atm, and hoping it succeeds as a better alternative to C++ 😛)
youtube.com/watch?v=teTroOAGZjM&t=22504s (6:15 start)
Ivan Reese 2023-04-03 20:43:47 Ah — I clicked the video title in the preview, and it didn't. Doh!
Tak Tran 2023-04-03 20:50:02 One interesting bit at the end (last 15mins I think), was talking about the history of UE, where from UE3 -> UE4, they dropped support for their initial attempt at an Unreal scripting language (UnrealScript?) in favour of C++/Blueprint, because it was just one person working on the language. But with the success of Fortnite, they could build a world class team to work on a new language that can be more future-proof for the metaverse. Don’t have enough programming language design expertise to tell whether the decisions they are making are good or not, but very curious how it’ll all turn out.
Edgars Krūmiņš 2023-04-04 07:04:40 +1 here, I also revisited the idea of starting to learn UE since it becomes more accessible to indies 🙂
Nick Smith 2023-04-05 00:12:06 I'm pretty excited about Verse's programming model. It supports the most interesting concepts from logic programming. For example, it's easy to express combinatorial searches, i.e. "find all pairs/n-tuples of things that have a certain relationship".
(In a conventional PL, you'd usually have to write a nested loop — or use a library — to express the same thing.)
William Taysom 2023-04-05 01:49:45 Most relevant slide. Finally concurrency semantics I can get behind!
David Alan Hjelle 2023-04-06 13:09:25 The last couple podcasts connecting with programmer productivity reminded me of this article trying to trace software's impact — or not — on overall productivity. It's main claim is that software, so far, has not had the expected impact on overall productivity, and that the challenge is that it is hard and expensive to model the real world within the constraints of programming. (Maybe you read it differently!) It seems to me that this is one big challenge with end-user programming, too: many people don't want to think beforehand about all the exceptions to a rule that happen in real life, since real life allows you to address those exceptions on-the-fly.
web.archive.org/web/20221206161753/https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/softwareisprocess.html
Eric Normand 2023-04-09 13:10:08 Oh geez. That's a good explanation for why we haven't see ever-increasing productivity despite all of the investment on in software. For individuals and small teams, computers aren't much better than analog tech like in-person discussions or pencil and paper. I feel that in a lot of things I use computers for. So often, I'd rather do it on paper than deal with the upkeep of the hardware and software to do it.
Eric Normand 2023-04-09 13:13:02 Just today I was helping my wife with a computer issue. It took one hour and I don't think I fully solved it. There is an issue several times per week that she interrupts my work for me to solve. Companies can afford IT departments. To maintain a small fleet of household computers, I play that role. These are the kinds of costs that only are recouped in large organizations.
Eric Normand 2023-04-09 13:16:39 On the other hand, I think there are some industries/verticals that have been beneficiaries of huge productivity gains. I once was talking to an architect at a party. He was saying that before the industry was computerized, most of their time was spent erasing lines on blueprints. There was a suite of tools and tacit knowledge about how to remove lines without destroying the paper. Computerization meant they could edit the digital copy and print out a new one, at the cost of a much poorer user interface (mouse and keyboard vs pencil and t-square) for the initial draft.
Eric Normand 2023-04-09 13:17:04 Of course, things like that are a one-time win. They don't compound.
Tom Hutchinson 2023-04-07 02:59:08 Electric Clojure (previously called “Photon”) is pretty exciting, it “fully abstracts over client/server state sync at the programming language layer” which I found a bit hard to get my head around but this new example site does a great job of explaining the idea. One of the interesting things I’ve seen made with it is this Clojure spreadsheet app.
João Araújo 2023-04-08 20:37:01
🐦 Azlen: Computer history by Balenciaga
Chris Knott 2023-04-09 14:01:18 It's mostly AIGI except Alan Kay who recently signed a 4 year contract with Balenciaga
George Mauer 2023-04-09 21:25:44 No Claude Shannon? Boo
Oh hey what's up @Eric Normand. Cool to see you on here
Ivan Reese 2023-04-09 23:05:31 Gonna go out on a limb and say Andreessen doesn't have the same cachet as all these other cats (even Jobs) and his inclusion is, as the kids say, mid.
Ivan Reese 2023-04-09 23:07:01 But the overall concept and vibe are so cool, and I like that. It's very pulpy. I'm a sucker for high brow + low brow.
George Mauer 2023-04-10 14:19:33 where are people seeing that Alan Kay joined Balenciaga. I'm not seeing anything on Google
Ivan Reese 2023-04-10 18:33:24 I think Chris Knott might have been making a joke. I'm not sure.
In general, I love this fuzzy boundary between what's real, what's fake, what's a joke
