Author Archives: Jonathan Edwards

We’ve published the final videos from the Future Programming Workshop. We will also be publishing a final report about our experiences and lessons from the workshop. Included in the videos is my latest screencast about Subtext: Two-way Dataflow. The abstract: Subtext is an experiment to radically simplify application programming. The goal is to combine the […]

It’s time to reformulate the principles guiding my work. [Revised definition of complexity in response to misunderstandings]

Final version of the paper is up, and an essay with embedded videos is here. Sean graciously invited me to coauthor but the ideas are really his – I just helped spin them. We think there is great promise in abstracting away from the computer model of time. There is a large design space that is […]

I’ll be demoing my latest work at the Future Programming Workshop at both Strange Loop and SPLASH. My talk is called “Two-way Dataflow”. Here is the abstract: Subtext is an experiment to radically simplify application programming. The goal is to combine the power of frameworks like Rails and iOS with the simplicity of a spreadsheet. Mutable […]

Two announcements. First, the official Call for Submissions is up. Second, we will be at StrangeLoop too. We are partnering with Alex Payne and his Emerging Languages Camp to run FPW on the day before StrangeLoop. You can submit for SPLASH or StrangeLoop or both. See the Call for more details. Now you have twice the motivation […]

Richard Gabriel and I are planning a workshop at SPLASH focused on screencast demos: The Future Programming Workshop. This will be a workshop in the sense of a writer’s workshop: the participants will present their talks/demos and the group will critique them. After the workshop people will revise their screencasts to be published on our […]

Interesting new work: Lamdu [Hacker News discussion] from Eyal Lotem and Yair Chuchem. They aren’t showing a lot of results yet, but I really like the espoused principles of the project. This is worth keeping an eye on. They are building an advanced IDE for a variant of Haskell with keyword arguments and structural record […]

From: Leo A. Meyerovich and Ariel S. Rabkin. Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption. OOPSLA 2013.

I made a screencast explaining the new type system of Subtext 5: type as subtext I have also refreshed the subtext website and redirected it to subtext-lang.org

Another masterpiece from Bret Victor: The Future of Programming. What you probably don’t know is that his talk was actually an hour long. The second half was censored from the internet by an as yet unexplained mechanism. Luckily his talk was written on sheets of cellulose which survived the digital attack. I have seen these slides […]

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 […]