Category: General

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 website. Please signup at the website if you are interested.

Increasingly, new programming ideas show up first as video talks and screencast demos, long before any papers get written. A good example is Bret Victor’s videos. My own screencasts have led to far more interaction than my papers. Frankly, writing papers is really hard, especially for raw new ideas. Non-academics often struggle to write papers, effectively excluding them from the conversation. The point of this workshop is to foster the exchange of radical new programming ideas in their formative stage, via the medium of screencasts. We hope to build a community of explorers at the frontier of programming. Please join us.

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 types (Subtext makes the same choices). They have moved type inference from the compiler into the IDE, where it can be exploited for assisting programming. I like that they are thinking beyond just live execution to the bigger issues of code refactoring and intensional versioning. They also appreciate the benefits of normalizing code formatting: “co-macros” re-sugar into normal forms (ditto Subtext).

It will be most interesting to see in what ways Lamdu alters the experience of Haskell. I’ve long said that functional languages are a better fit for advanced IDEs. Haskell is the state of the art in functional programming, so it is a useful experiment to enliven and illuminate it, and perhaps even make it more friendly. If they can pull this off it will be a really big win because they can leverage the large capital investment in Haskell implementation and libraries.

I wish Lamdu the best of luck and look forward to learning more about it.

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 and can exclusively reveal their contents.
Continue reading “Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk”