Author Archives: Jonathan Edwards

Coding again at last! In Dart. Herewith are my initial experiences with Dart.

The following is an abstract of a position statement for the Live programming workshop at ICSE.

Time for a progress report, now that I have some progress to report. I didn’t get much research done last semester because I was teaching a new class: 6.170 Software Studio. It was a noble experiment with mixed results, but that is another story. Back in March I presented the latest version of Subtext at the IFIP [...]

The process of constructing instruction tables should be very fascinating. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. – Turing, A. M., 1946, Proposed electronic calculator, report for National Physical Laboratory, Teddington So was Turing wrong, or are [...]

The discussion on the last post suggested Domain Specific IDEs as a possible way forward. By restricting the domain (e.g. games) the IDE might gain enough semantic insight into the program to properly support advanced interaction designs like live code execution and direct manipulation of results. Well here is a perfect example: the Iguana Translator. These guys [...]

The internets are buzzing with new IDE ideas. I credit Bret Victor’s masterful demo for much of this. Chris Granger is having amazing success kickstarting his IDE concept. Josh Marinacci discussed some possibilities. [Another one: Instant C#] I have been working in this area for over a decade and have very mixed feelings about these [...]

On Kickstarting research I asked for comments on the Light Table project. They were largely positive. Now, for the sake of argument, let’s assume this will be a complete disaster (a reasonable assumption based on history). What are the consequences? Are people going to be pissed off and give similar efforts a bad rap? Or will they [...]

Chris Granger has a Kickstarter project to fund his IDE concept Light Table. He is looking for $200K and already has more than $100K in 13 days. It took him 6 days to build the demo. There is much I want to say about this, but it all pales in comparison to the raw facts [...]

It’s time to put it down on paper: http://splashcon.org/2012/cfp/due-april-13-2012/380-onward-papers  

http://visi.io/ My motivation for Visi is to change the landscape of computer languages the way that VisiCalc changed the language and computing landscape in 1979. Yes yes yes!

This post from the JavaScript team at Microsoft endorses JavaScript evolution as the basis of the future web, and criticizes the “clean break” of Dart. It also reveals Script#, Microsoft’s equivalent to GWT, used to write “hundreds of thousands” of lines of code in their Office Web Applications. This is hypocrisy. They endorse JavaScript while finding it [...]

I saw an interesting demo at SPLASH of an end-user visual programming language: Cloud Extend. There were two main interesting points. First, it is used to build plugins for Salesforce. Major web applications like Salesforce, and especially Facebook, are becoming software platforms unto themselves. This is a great target domain for end-user programming tools. The [...]

I have to rewrite Subtext in JavaScript. First, a quick update. I presented my prototype implementation at the working group this summer, to a tepid response. But in the course of preparing for that I thought of a radical simplification to the language. That inspired a whole rampage of brutal simplifications. The code is so [...]

I have been looking at the various touch/tablet platforms. It seems to me that the JavaScript/HTML5 stuff is way out past the frontier of civilization. There is a saying that when armchair warriors meet they talk about strategy and tactics, but when generals meet they talk about logistics. Likewise when someone shows me a new [...]

I saw some interesting work on touch programming languages at Onward. You may already have seen Codify. That is still a mostly textual language, as the clickety-click of the keyboard in the video attests. The new research explores how to program entirely in touch, which requires avoiding typing as much as possible.

Steve Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, writes in the NY Times: The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He [...]

New workshop at POPL: Off the Beaten Track: Underrepresented Problems for Programming Language Researchers. In other words: “New Problems for Old Solutions”.

I am program chair of Onward! 2012. What do you want to see? Here is one thing I am thinking about. I understand that in the real sciences, conferences often accept papers based solely on an abstract. That wouldn’t work for Onward, or even most of CS. Perhaps we should instead use the opposite of [...]