Chatterbase

Interesting code-essay from Joe Edelman: Chatterbase. I see this as a reply to my Transcript proposal (now Chorus). It is gratifying to get this kind of feedback. This is how we make progress – it is what academics mean when they talk about how research is a “conversation” – people’s work triggers others to contradict/extend it in a virtuous cycle of progress. While I have many issues with how academic computer science works, this is one piece of wisdom we shouldn’t ignore.

Joe’s declarative social appears to be essentially what I call social datatypes, but his soft automation attempts to go beyond the fairly rigid workflow envisioned in Chorus. As with Joe’s previous work he is deeply concerned with the humanism of social media – making it suit the way people naturally function rather than the other way around. I take his point, and would like to make Chorus work as informally as possible.

Joe makes the intriguing suggestion that out-of-band communication like email, chat, or even voice should suffice to satisfy obligations in the workflow. It is interesting to think about how that could be done. Here is a speculation: many current attempts at AI chatbots will fail to work beyond the most generic conversations because they have insufficient knowledge of the subject at hand. Perhaps the declarative scripts that Joe and I envision could supply the needed formal description.

I’m hoping this is the start of a little mini-field of people working on Socially-facilitating Software. Maybe someday we can hold a workshop. But in the meantime, in the spirit of encouraging the sort of conversation I spoke of above, I’ve add a “See also” section to the Chorus website.

 

I scare myself

I’m afraid the only way to realize the Transcript vision of end-user programming is to start a company. I did that once. After many years of toil and tears I was incredibly lucky to exit successfully and I swore then I would never put myself through that again. I would much prefer to have an open-source project delivering an excellent end-user experience while also continuing to research and innovate, working with interesting people on a humane schedule. As far as I can tell that has never happened.

Building a high-quality end-user product requires a lot of hard work that is not appealing to open-source contributors. They want to work on what they know and use – programming tools and libraries. Academic researchers want to play with cool new ideas. You need to pay professionals to do the hard design, engineering and support work required to deliver a product. You need to have revenue to pay those professionals. Unless I can find some benevolent sugar daddy I am afraid I may eventually need to start a company.

Does anyone know of open-source or academic projects that have built an innovative end-user product? Note: for end-users, not for programmers. Also note: innovative, not a clone of an existing commercial project. I’d love to see a successful example.

 

ch-ch-changes

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.

 

 

Why programming languages matter

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.

Unfortunately we got only the power of the Gods, not their wisdom, and so we have created things of vast ugliness and secreted our powers within a cognitive priesthood. Perhaps programming languages could also play a part in solving these problems.