Author: Jonathan Edwards

A lot has happened in the last year. I left MIT and joined CDG (Alan Kay’s lab), working with Alex Warth. I’ve been going to LA a lot. We are working on an end-user programming tool called Transcript.

My Holy Grail has been to radically simplify professional programming. I now realize that simplification is not fundamentally a technical problem but rather a cultural one. Our nerd culture embraces inhuman levels of complexity. Mastering mind-boggling complexity is our mutant superpower. It is our tribal marker. Complexity is the air we breath, and so it is invisible to us. Simplification will only come from outside this culture. To disrupt programming I first have to reinvent it for a fresh audience of non-programmers.

Here’s a video of our first (very rough and preliminary) talk about Transcript.

A colleague asked this question and here is my answer:

Programming gives us the power of the Gods to create things out of pure thought. Programming languages are the incantations and gestures we use to perform this magic.

For programming to start over we need to target the fresh minds of non-programmers, and find a new application domain that isn’t already completely built up.

I’ll be talking about my next initiative at YOW!: Transcript: End-User Programming Of Social Apps.

I’m teaming up with Alex Warth.

The reaction to my latest work [Two-way Dataflow] has been distinctly underwhelming. My diagnosis: I’ve solved a problem most people aren’t aware they have, and it comes at the steep price of replacing the conventional tech stack. Facebook has a cheaper solution: Flux. I have to give them credit for taking the problem seriously (unlike many of the reactive programming enthusiasts) and coming up with a pragmatic solution that just adds another layer to the stack. That’s what programmers want, not a fundamental solution in a new programming paradigm. It is obvious that we can’t keep growing the stack forever but no one wants to deal with it now. Especially computer scientists (don’t get me started).

I think I need to shift focus to end-users and non-programmers. I’ve avoided that because I want to prove that we can dramatically simplify real large-scale programming — simplifying simple problems is not so convincing. But replacing the whole stack is just too hard to do all at once and all by myself, and only doing it on small examples is not convincing either. End-user programming could be a way to get started and get users and (especially) have collaborators. Industrial strength programming would come later, but at least I now have a sketch of how it should look. Building something real would be such a refreshing change from the last decade of thought experiments. I’m excited by the prospect of once again shipping buggy code and having irate users and getting into fights with my colleagues. That’s life.

The Future Programming Workshop will return this year to SPLASH and Strange Loop. See http://www.future-programming.org/call.html. This year we are taking any kind of media, not just videos. Web pages and papers are welcome too. By request of the academic members of our community we will publish proceedings containing the paper-format submissions. We are applying for permission to publish the proceedings in the ACM Digital Library but will go somewhere else if necessary.

Like last year we will offer the option to present at the Strange Loop pre-conference FPWxELC event. Unlike last year there will also be a chance to present publicly at SPLASH. The SPLASH event will be two days: the first for public presentations and the second for the private writers’ workshop.

Thanks to Richard Gabriel and Alex Payne for teaming up with me to make this happen.

Submission deadline is August 7 (pre-submit July 19 for Strange Loop). So get to work and show us what you’ve got!