Podcast
Feeling of Computing
Hosted by Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, and Lu Wilson · EN
A romp through the field of computer programming, grapling with our history and wondering what should come next. A mix of deeply technical talk, philosophy, art, dark lore, and good takes. Hosted by Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, and Lu Wilson.
13episodes
Episodes
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Technical Dimensions of Feedback in Live Programming Systems by Josh Horowitz
4w ago02:09:20Tap to summarizeThis episode is about the paper Technical Dimensions of Feedback in Live Programming Systems by Josh Horowitz. [THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK] [SERIOUSLY, IF YOU WANT SOMETHING HERE, WRITE IT YOURSELF] [NO PROMISES. MAKE IT GOOD] It's a solid episode — that's my take. You should listen to it instead of reading about it. And then give us your take. Links $ Gang, I'm sorry this episode is months late. It was a real doozy! But also, the bonus episodes over on our Patreon have been getting wildly ambitious. I did an insanely edited 54-minute video about The Browser Company. We had William Taysom over to share a deep critical analysis of The Witness. Jimmy and I shared what we'd do with our lives if we weren't doing computer stuff. And most recently, we spilled the design tea on two recent projects we've been working on — Jimmy's Whiteboard visual programming system, and Tenfold from Ink & Switch. If you like the FoC podcast, you'll get so much more of it for $5/month at feelingoff.com. Audio Hijack — this is the program we use to record the podcast. It has "Canadian Juice", which is a joke only Lu will get, but Lu isn't going to read this. But you all know what "juice" is, right? It's what Andrew Blinn does better than anyone, and he IS reading this. He fucking better be. Am I narrowcasting? Jimmy mentioned Notes from the Underground. I haven't read it, so I can't add snark. Sorry. We're making backend changes! Stay tuned. The new website for this podcast will be feelingof.com. You should check out that website, cool stuff there, and they have a podcast. The Hest podcast, which Ivan has always self-hosted (so to speak), is, basically, 38 episodes of Ivan describing what he's devoting his life to, one episode about the combat loop of the video game Death Stranding, and one episode about getting smaller and smaller forever, but make it music and about Ivan's misspent youth. If you're reading this and you haven't listened to it, what the hell are you doing! You'll love it so much! PlayBook is the project that the Programmable Ink folks at Ink & Switch have been working on since January 2024. Ivan is one of those folks. I'm one of those Ivans. Specifically, this is "the show notes writing Ivan". Have you met? He writes the show notes. I commentate on his work. This… paper(!)… was originally presented as a talk at LIVE PROG — which is almost a FOUR FOUR — in 2024 as a talk called Definitions & Dimensions of Liveness. Jimmy and Lu and I were in the room! Maybe that's the last time we'll ever be in the room. (Did you listen to the free 2025 holiday spectacular?) You sat along the fire… you saw the light… you saw. You're Sigur Rós, you're so. Why am I crying? Inventing on Principle — do we need to link to this? If you're reading these show notes and you haven't watched this talk, email hello@feelingof.com and I'll give you a virtual hug because you're listening to our podcast without getting, like, any of the jokes? Observable — same snark as previous Projection Boxes — now this one, I hadn't heard of, but if you have heard of it reach out and tell me about it so that I can be in on our jokes. The Ostrogoths are not rats, but I'm ready for either of them to invade Alberta. (Aside for any Alberta-curious listeners: there's interesting political history / class warfare here) Quokka is an editor extension that gives you live evaluated values right in the context of your JS code. Seems super neat on paper, but Ivan didn't have much luck using it. (skill issue) Glamorous Toolkit is the shining example of a "moldable" development environment. PANE is an interesting node-wire programming environment by Josh Horowitz, which flips the usual format by making the nodes hold state and the wires represent transformations. Node? Wire? Junk? Pipe? Baby Died, one of the uncountably infinite classic bits from My Brother, My Brother, and Me. Sketch-n-Sketch is one of the all-time great bidirectional editing environments. There's even an FoC episode about it. Sculpin is an environment that lets you use the mouse to interact with JSON data and incrementally enrich it into a GUI. It's sick! Wisp is a whitespace-based Lisp. This is one of the coolest websites I've seen in a hot sec. The 2019 Mac Pro had a Xeon, and sucked, like a room full of alien eggs, really, any room full of alien eggs. The 2019 MacBook Pro did not have a Xeon, but ran stupidly hot and also sucked, but not in a way that involves alien eggs AFAIK. Imagine a material FPGA (Field-programmable gate array). NOT field-programmable gatorade. NOT FPGA stop making jokes everyone that's not why we're here. We're here to discuss two things: computers, and feelings, and I'm all out of feelings. Stop Drawing Dead Fish… I need like an autocomplete for stuff we reference in every second episode. Can you imagine if I linked to Clojure every time we talked about it? Here's a nice demo of Boxer, if you've never seen it. The title of Josh's paper was inspired by Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems, a work by longtime friends of FoC Joel Jakubovic, Jonathan Edwards and Tomas Petricek. There's a link I can't include because it would be a spoiler for… not the next episode (Grice), not the one after that (Papert), but the one after that (Plant). She'll be out eventually; sea—por favor—paciente; see you in July; Tiny Huge; the sort of looking back in hindsight you've come to expect at 40. The Chorus: Daniel Tempkin chee rabbits Eli Mellen Brooklyn Zelenka Jack Rusher Arcade Wise Joshua Horowitz Taylor Troesh zuggamasta? Stuart Presnell Sam McDonald n Tobias babel (they/them) (oi oi, what's all this about, then?) Eric Paul C chris shank Scott McKinley Evans Corey Moran Lim Oliver Mahmoud H ...
Transcribe →The Computer is a Feeling by Tim Hwang & Omar Rizwan
Jan 1402:33:49Tap to summarizeWe've renamed the podcast and community — we are now the Feeling of Computing! Here are some thoughts about the motivation to rename and the choice of new name. It's a small change, but it feels meaningful and clarifying. The new name better fits what we've been doing all along, and sets us up for the next decade of this community. The new name reminded us of The Computer is a Feeling, a document (of some definition) by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan. Unlike our usual selections, which are crouton-dry and tiring, this one is basically a 1-pager, quick and fun — you should totally give it a glance and see what you make of it, before Jimmy and I tease it apart and lawyer over the many nuances. This piece makes us question what the computer means in our lives, and how that may have changed over time. Light on specifics and arguably steeped in nostalgic yearning, its series of declarative statements come out more like broadly probing questions. Is the computer feeling possessed only by those who remember the time before the internet? Are computers even required? What does feeling this feeling elicit one to do? We answer at least one of these questions. "But you can't trust them, they're podcasters," said everyone ever, "you've got to feel it for yourself." Links $ While these main Feeling of Computing episodes are, in a word, infrequent, the bonus episodes over on our Patreon — Feeling Off — arrive at a dependable regularity! Why, in the time since we recorded this here episode, we've released two (2) bonus episodes. The first was a unruly deep tangent Jimmy and I fell upon right smack in the middle of this very episode, and then excised out — That's Shakespeare — about code.org, whether the "everyone should learn to code" movement is actually about literacy, the backlash to this movement, and our personal feelings on it all. Then in December we shared our annual end-of-the-year spectacular with games, awards, music, spelling, men who are spiders, and our predictions about the near and distant future — All of the False Ones — free free free for download, no patronage required. The old name is cursed. The old name might have been inspired by Bret Victor's talk The Future of Programming, but the vibe of the community is probably closer to Inventing on Principle. The new name invites us to reflect on the way our tools make us feel. For instance, Kid Pix was a quirky, playful drawing program designed for younger users which had its heyday in the 1990s when Ivan was a younger user, and it gave him some pretty specific feelings at the time. (Also, in the time since recording this episode, Ivan dug up a Snow Leopard iMac from the sedimentary rock and installed KidPix Studio 4, and his 6 year-old daughter has been having a blast with it.) One Piece is a manga and anime that's pretty popular, but perhaps off-topic for our community. Did you know about our virtual meetups? Every month we have people showing off their work, and it's been fantastic to see the wild variety of creative programming projects built by members of our community. We share the details of upcoming meetups in the #announcements channel on our Slack, and publish them in this Luma calendar. You should come! The feeling is still present, in your time, as it was in ours You can build computers out of water, if you want Sim City 3000 was released in 1999, and gave Jimmy the computer feeling. (Ivan played Sim City 2000 back in 1997-ish, and got pretty good at typing the word "FUND", before learning that this didn't actually give you free money and instead gave you a bond.) When Ivan says "go to six or seven bookmarks", that's a reference to this appfrom 2024, not the mid 2025 meme. The two folks in our sphere — Folk Computer by Omar (et al), and FolkJS by Chris Shank and Orion Reed. Folk Computer is similar to Dynamicland, which Omar did some interesting work on. Back in 1997, Ivan taught himself to edit videos using Avid Cinema, a Mac-only video editing tool that predates iMovie but served similar goals. (It came bundled with the infamous Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One, aka the "Molar Mac", which was Ivan's second home computer.) The Programmable Ink gang at Ink & Switch have spent the past few years on this one project, and it sometimes gives Ivan the computer feeling. The Bazaar and the… The Whatever… Yeah, Yeah. MetaCreations was the company behind Bryce 3D and Poser 3, which Ivan used quite extensively when he was a young'un. Here's a photo of Ivan, midlife crisis rapidly approaching, holding his original Bryce 3D box. Wormholes used in this episode: One wormhole to/from the Feeling Off bonus episode That's Shakespeare No secret wormholes. ! Send us gushing, uncomfortably familiar fan mail, join the Feeling Of community, and find us on-line: A: B: C: D: e: F: G: H: I: 🐘 🦋 🌐 J: 🐘 🦋 🌐 K: L: 🐘 🦋 🌐 M: N: O: P: Q: R: S: T: U: V: W: X: Y: Z: https://feelingof.com/episodes/079Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously
Sep 2701:53:46Tap to summarizeOne of the biggest goals of this show — our raisin detour, if you will — is to encourage people to look at computer programming differently. It's not just a job, or a way to make the computer do what you want. Code isn't just the material you sculpt into apps and games and websites. The very act of programming itself, and the languages we make and use to do that programming, reflect who we are as people. Programming languages say something. Esolangs — esoteric programming languages — are programming languages created for these more self-reflective purposes. To some, they're defined by what they're not: not for serious use, not for education, not for efficiency. To others, they're a bunch of funny jokes that people can commiserate through after suffering the steep learning curve of becoming a programmer. A few find in them an opportunity to explore strange computational models, or baffling syntax designs. But is there more to them? Could there be? In this episode, we're discussing a preprint of the paper Let's Take Esoteric Programming Languages Seriously by Jeremy Singer and Steve Draper, and struggling with what it even means to give esoteric languages their due. Links $ Each of these episodes is a labour of love. If you appreciate that labour, slip us a five on Patreon. As is the norm, you'll get a second RSS feed with a bonus episode each and ev-er-y month. Except this month, there's actually two (2) bonus episodes, for the simple reason that this podcast swells with bubbles of hot waxy fluid that spill the container of my Ableton Live when they pop. The first pop is a half hour cut from this esolangs ep, the three of us brainstorming esolangs we'd enjoy, super casual and playful, perfect for building your parasocial podcast relationship, you'll love it. The second bonus, as I'm sure you've been expecting, is three hours of Jimmy and I relaying our experiences with Silksong, unpacking its few contentious design decisions, fawning over exquisite details, the good shit. So yeah, hand us one hundred nickles, help Ivan repair his basement, enjoy more of… whatever this is. Daniel Temkin 🛌 😴💤😘 esoteric.codes Daniel's new book, Forty-Four Esolangs Joana Chicau The Less Humble Programmer Esolangs Wiki Entropy, an esolang by (total dreamboat) Daniel Temkin Unnecessary, the 4:33 of esolangs, by Keymaker Turing Paint by Byron Knoll, which is similar to Brian Silverman's Wireworldand Lu's Cableworld Ivan's Visual Programming Codex, a collection of all the cool visual programming things Ivan has come across in his travels. Riskopoly — The Game of Capitalist Imperialism! Fanny#In_slang Brainfuck and Whitespace are two canonical esolangs. Our episode on Structure of a Programming Language Revolution, which includes extended discussion of Ivan's father-in-law's lookalike. Dreamberd is one of Lu's Esoteric programming languages, which has a (let's just say) "interesting" relationship with AI. The Story of Mel Piet, Befunge, and Malbolge are more classic, oft-cited esolangs. Fractran deserves special mention, since the language is comprised entirely of fractions, which is pretty neat. MarkovJunior also deserves special mention. Seriously, go look at the examples. Wild stuff. It's by Maxim Gumin, who also did the famous WaveFunctionCollapse project. We did an entire interview episode about Orca with creator Devine Lu Linvega, who more recently made Tote, a reversible rewriting sandbox. Reversible computing, something Ivan is particularly interested in. XKCD's comic X, about a programming language that uses fonts creatively. ArnoldC is one of those esolangs, like Shakespeare, Chef (which, actually, is kinda good actually if you actually have to eat whatever you code), or LOLCODE Wat; still hits. Bodyfuck Evil.css, "subtle and not-so-subtle CSS rules that will slowly drive people insane" Hest doesn't exist. Code golfing is the practice of making your code as succinct as possible, often at the expense of readability (though it leads certain people to write really good coffeescript). The International Obfuscated C Code Contest is related, in that it's about writing C code where unreadability is the goal. Jimmy would like to challenge y'all to write Fizz Buzz with no booleans, no conditionals, no pattern matching, or other things that are like disguised booleans. Arroost is a musical programming environment Lu made to NORMALIZE SHARING SCRAPPY FIDDLES. Inform is a natural programming language for interactive storytelling. PuzzleScript is a rewriting language for making tile-based puzzle games. Each of these sits at an interesting spot somewhere on the twisty boundary between the programming meaning of "expression" and the human meaning of "expression". The School for Poetic Computation occasionally runs a class called Digital Love Languages. Coming Out Simulator and other works by Nicky Case, and dys4ia by Anna Anthropy, are wonderful examples of the sort of deeply personal expression Lu and Ivan would like to see in programming tools. What music does Ivan listen to? Well… here's most of it. What music does Ivan make? Well… here's some of it. But Jimmy is fond of Diminished Fifth, an attempt to make some shrinking music with ClojureScript. It's no Merzbow. Zachtronics games, like exapunks — are they esolangs? A good number of recent videogames have included conlangs (constructed languages), such as 2023's fabulous Chants of Sennaar — but beware of spoilers, as some of these games might use the obscurity of the conlang to hide secrets in plain sight. Minecraft, natch, has a conlang for enchantments, and it's worth mentioning that redstone is an esolang of a sort. And then there's the Turing tarpit games, like Baba is You… the l...
Transcribe →As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
Jul 2201:59:30Tap to summarizeA classic "80-year predictions" episode. How did we do, humanity? Here's the article (free with ads): As We May Think Links $ Patreon We're considering changing The Name of the FoC community, podcast, et cetera. Transatlantic Accent, and all the ships at sea. This episode's advertisements: Ex-Lax, Mifflin, et cetera. The New Media Reader is a good read(er). Blue Prince is surely everyone's 2025 GOTY. You'll find ample discussion of its twisty design in our bonus feed. Oppenheimer was probably my least favourite David Nolen movie. ENIAC was, for a time, the computer. Engelbart The Polaroid instant camera dates back to the 1940s! Google Glass and Ray-Ban Meta, sigh Wikipedia's List of Existing Technologies Predicted in Science Fiction Apparently microfilm and microfiche are both instances of microform. Boy Milk, no explanation needed. Sean M. Carroll, physicist. Claude Shannon, information theorist ;) AI Is Not Your Friend appeared in The Atlantic on May 9th, 2025. Amazon Mechanical Turk is "artificial artificial intelligence". Awesome GitHub lists Daring Fireball and Kottke.org are two long-running blogs that helped popularize the "linkblog" form. The Wirecutter was our previous top pick for product recommendations, but their history of shilling junk and our growing concerns about e-waste have led us to downgrade them in our rankings. Devine (the other Lu) maintains a pair of wikis, one for hundredrabbits and another for research and projects. Alexander Obenauer also does a lovely job publishing research notes. Unison and Dynamicland are two strong visions for the future of computing. Music: lemon (tussed/screwed because everyone listens at 2x) ! Send us email, join the FoC community, and find us on-line: I: 🐘 🦋 🌐 J: 🐘 🦋 🌐 K: N/A L: 🐘 🦋 🌐 See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/077Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing (feat. Felienne Hermans)
Apr 27, 202502:11:38Tap to summarizeYou know Alan Turing, right? And the Turing test? Have you actually read the paper that introduced it, Computing Machinery and Intelligence? No?! You… you are not prepared. With very special guest: Felienne Hermans Notes $ Patreon Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000 podcast, from Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. "Always read the footnotes" [The Language Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy) by Ludwig Wittgenstein Can Machines Think? by W. "Billy" Mays Lu's paper with Dave Ackley, Dialogues on Natural Code describes how the symbiote will spread to consume all of humanity. Reclaiming AI as a Theoretical Tool for Cognitive Science by Iris van Rooij et al. Ned Block's Blockhead Nick Cave's thoughts on AI song lyrics. For instance: "Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. […] It is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering." What Computers Can't Do by Hubert Dryfus Wittgenstein on Rules by Saul Kripke Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? by Nathan Ensmenger Computers as Theatre by Brenda Laurel ! Send us email, especially questions or topics you'd like us to discuss on future episodes, share your wildest ideas in the Slack, and: IVAN: 🐘 🦋 🌐 JIMM: 🐘 🦋 🌐 TODE: 🐘 🦋 🌐 FELI: 🐘 🦋 🌐 See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/076Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans
Feb 16, 202502:04:08Tap to summarizeIn the academic field of programming language research, there are a few prestigious conferences that you must present at to advance in your career. These conferences are rather selective about which presentations they'll accept. If your research work involves proving formal properties about a programming language, you'll have their ear. But if your work looks at, say, the human factors of language design, you might as well not bother applying — and thus, not bother pursuing that work in the first place. Why is the formalistic, systems-focused work elevated, and the human-focused work diminished? And what are the downstream consequences, the self-reinforcing feedback loops that come from this narrow focus? In this episode we discuss a paper by Felienne Hermans and Ari Schlesinger titled, A case for Feminism in Programming Language Design. It applies the lens of intersectional feminism to reveal a startling lack of "Yes, and…" in academic computer science, where valuable avenues of inquiry are closed off, careers are stifled, and people are unintentionally driven away from contributing to the field, simply because their passions and expertise don't conform to a set of invisible expectations. Through heartbreaking personal anecdotes and extensive supporting references, the paper makes the case that there's a lot of high-value greenfield work to be done, and people who would love to do it — but we will need to collectively identify, understand, and then fix a few broken incentives before it'll happen. Notes $ Patreon Polypad, dubbed the "best piece of education software for smartboards" by published academic Luke Wilson Or is it Mathigon? "Looks like a nice Desmos", opines enterprise sales expert Ivan Reese. Market💡Facts.ca Hedy, a multi-lingual programming environment for the classroom created by Felienne. Welcome to the TALK BLOC: Felienne Hermans at Onward! 2024: A case for Feminism in Programming Language Design Ivan and Alex Warth at LIVE 2024: Inkling Lu at LIVE 2024: Arroost Lu at Onward! 2024: Dialogs on Natural Code Discovering Your Software Umwelt by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Allen Wirfs-Brock, and Jordan Wirfs-Brock A New Cognitive Perspective on Simplicity in System and Product Design by FoC community member and previous bonus episode guest, Stefan Lesser Redressing the Balance: A Yin-Yang Perspective on Information Technology by FoC community member Konrad Hinsen Foremost among the contributions to society by Icebergs are their inspiration of the meme Alex McLean as in Insane in the Membrane FOUR FOUR Mary Shaw, previous guest Zachtronics make some hard puzzle games. Define Define, a really great video about that. Oh, you question toxic masculinity, yet you live within the gender binary? ! Send us email, especially if you're an avid listener who happens to work for a placement agency and knows an AI thought leader who has advised 5000 startups and would be a great fit for our show, share your ideas in the Slack, and: Eats: Mastodon • Website Shoots: Mastodon • Website Leaves: Mastodon • Website See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/75Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Is the Whole Universe a Computer™?
Jan 5, 202502:12:30Tap to summarize"Is the whole universe a computer?", ask Jack Copeland, Mark Sprevak, and Oron Shagrir in chapter 41 of the book The Turing Guide. They split this question in two, first asking whether the universe itself is a computer, then whether the universe could even be computed. These are lofty, unanswerable questions, sure, but they encroach on our territory — philosophy, automata, nonsense. So, in our usual reverent style and with attentive pacing, the three of us explore the paper, the questions, the answers they choose to highlight, and even share a few perfectly reasonable answers of our own. Links $ Patreon In no particular order: Carl Sagan What it means to be open was Lu's talk at Heart of Clojure Rudy Rucker Is the brain a digital computer? by John Searle The Plankth of time. C is Not a Low-Level Language by David Chisnall The Connection Machine!! Komgloverav… Komolgorov… Outer Worlds? Outer Wilds? The Witness Music featured in this episode: No! That's a spoiler. No way I'm telling you. ! Send us email, share your ideas in the Slack, and catch us while you still can: Carl: Mastodon • Website Jimmy: Mastodon • Website Lu: Mastodon • Website See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/74Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning
Aug 25, 202402:44:27Tap to summarizeAlexander Repenning created AgentSheets, an environment to help kids develop computational thinking skills. It wrapped an unusual computational model with an even more unusual user interface. The result was divisive. It inspired so many other projects, whilst being rejected at every turn and failing to catch on the way Scratch later did. So in 2017, Repenning published this obit of a paper, Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets, which covers his findings over the years as AgentSheets evolved and transformed, and gives perspective on block-based programming, programming-by-example, agents / rule / rewrite systems, automata, and more. This is probably the most "normal" episode we've done in a while — we stay close to the text and un-clam many a thought-tickling pearl. I'm saying that sincerely now to throw you off our scent the next time we get totally lost in the weeds. I hear a clock ticking. Links $ Do you want to move beyond syntax? Frustrated by a lack of syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic support? Join our Patreon! Choose the tier that best reflects your personal vision of the future of coding. Get (frequently unhinged) monthly bonus content. Most of all: let us know that you enjoy this thing we do, and help us keep doing it for years to come. Argos, for our non-UK listeners. They were acquired by future TodePond sponsor, Sainsbury's. Once again, I am asking for your Marcel Goethals makes a lot of cool weird stuff and is a choice follow. Scratch isn't baby programming. Also, you should try this bizarre game Ivan programmed in 3 blocks of Scratch. Sandspiel Studio is a delightful block-based sand programming simulator automata environment. Here's a video of Lu and Max introducing it. Simple Made Easy, a seminal talk by Rich Hickey. Still hits, all these years later. Someday we'll do an episode on speech acts. Rewrite rules are one example of rewriting in computing. Lu's talk —and I quote— "at Cellpond", was actually at SPLASH, about Cellpond, and it's a good talk, about —and I quote— "actually, what if they didn't give up on rewrite rules at this point in history and what if they went further?" Oh yeah — Cellpond is cool. Here's a video showing you how it works. And here's a video studying how that video works. And here's a secret third thingthat bends into a half-dimension. Here's Repenning's "rule-bending" paper: Bending the Rules: Steps Toward Semantically Enriched Graphical Rewrite Rules I don't need to link to SimCity, right? You all know SimCity? Will Wright is, arguably, the #1 name in simulation games. Well, you might not have caught the fantastic article Model Metropolis that unpacks the (inadvertently?) libertarian ideology embodied within the design of its systems. I'd also be remiss not to link to Polygon's video (and the corresponding write-up), which lend a little more colour to the history. Couldn't find a good link to Blox Pascal, which appears in the paper Towards "Second Generation" Interactive, Graphical Programming Environments by Ephraim P. Glinert, which I also couldn't find a good link to. Projectional / Structural Editor. Here's a good one. Baba is You Vernacular Programmers Filling Typed Holes with Live GUIs is, AFAIK, the most current canonical reference for livelits. I'm not linking to Minecraft. But I will link to the Repeater 32 Checkboxes Wiremod is a… you know what, just watch this. Chomsky Hierarchy The Witness Ivan wrote a colorful Mastodon thread surveying the history of the Connection Machine. Harder Drive is a must-watch video by the inimitable Tom7. Also couldn't find a good link for TORTIS. :/ Programming by Example (PbE) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Alex Warth, one of the most lovely humans Ivan knows, is a real champion of "this, because that". Ivan's magnetic field simulations — Magnets! How do they work? Amit Patel's Red Blob Games, fantastic (fantastic!) explorable explanations that help you study various algorithms and techniques used in game development. Collaborative diffusion — "This article has multiple issues." Shaun Lebron, who you might know as the creator of Parinfer, made a game that interactively teaches you how the ghost AI works in Pac-Man. It's fun! Maxwell's Equations — specifically Gauss's law, which states that magnetic fields are solenoidal, meaning they have zero divergence at all points. University of Colorado Boulder has a collection of simulations called PhET. They're… mid, at least when compared to building your own simulation. For instance. Music featured in this episode: snot bubbles ! Send us email, share your ideas in the Slack, and catch us at these normal places: Ivan: Mastodon • Website Jimmy: Mastodon • Website Lu: Login • Website See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/073Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Pygmalion by David C. Smith
Jun 19, 202403:09:39Tap to summarizeIf you're anything like Ivan (oof, sorry), you've heard of Pygmalion but never caught more than the gist. Some sort of project from the early 70s, similar to Sketchpad or Smalltalk or something, yet another promising prototype from the early history of our field that failed to take the world by storm. Our stock-in-trade on this show. But you've probably heard of Programming by Demonstration. And you've certainly heard of icons — you know, those little pictures that have become indelibly part of computing as we know it. Pygmalion is the originator of these concepts… and more! The best introduction to Pygmalion is Mariano Guerra's No-code History: Pygmalion, which includes a clearly articulated summary of the big ideas, motivation, and design, with a video demonstration of the programming interface, key terminology, and links. The most introduction to Pygmalion — or Pig Million, The Millionth Pig, as it'll surely come to be known — is the subject of today's episode: the original paper by David Canfield Smith. Links $ We don't run ads on this show anymore. Sometimes Ivan makes a fake ad for a nonsense product like CarrotGrid or Hest, but those don't pay for the dirt & vapor we grow them in. But what if they could? Gonna just get this one out of the way: Quotation — and I quote, "A crucial semantic distinction between direct and indirect speech is that direct speech purports to report the exact words that were said or written EXACTLY AS THEY WERE SAID OR WRITTEN, LU, whereas indirect speech is a representation of speech in one's own words WHICH IS ALSO TOTALLY FINE, BUT JUST BE COOL ABOUT IT HEY?" @TodePond@mas.to: but wouldn't it be funny... if i quoted those statements on a podcast... and the podcast editor thought... "that doesn't sound right, bret can't have said that"... (he can do no wrong after all)... and so they thought i was just paraphrasing him wrong... and they didn't mark them as quotes like all the other quotes in the show... wouldn't that be funny DrawDeadFish.com Shout out to Brian Hempel who sent us (among other treats) this concise summary of Pig Million from the seminal book Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Recent FoC Patreon bonus episodes were about the game Baba is You and, on our first ever video episode, the design of a visual representation for machine code. Leda and the Swan. Lenna, a sexist test image that was and to some extent still is widely used in computer graphics. Living Computation Lu: Biscuit Jimmy: Biscuit Ivan: Limp Bizkit Fine, I might as well link to Frege and analogy. Aaron Sloman's INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The Role of Intuition and Non-Logical Reasoning in Intelligence Ivan: Platonism Jimmy: Neoplatonism Lu: Neuplatonism I would never Derrida Nosey words History of the alphabet TodeTode Lu: Conlang Ivan: Conlon Nancarrow, beloved (by Ivan, at least) composer of music for the Player Piano. Here's a baby-faced Adam Neely with the scoop if you're new to Nancarrow. Welcome. Jimmy: Conway Twitty Autological words Heterological words School for Poetic Computation Programming by Demonstration Player vs Environment For the video demonstrating the programming model, check Mariano's post Open Canvas Working Group Lu's project CellPond, and their SPLASH talk StageCast Creator Marcel Goethals makes a lot of cool weird stuff and is a choice follow. Why does it say "Put all the metal back in the ground" at the bottom of the show notes? Music featured in this episode: Various old stuff by Ivan. The music for StageCast Creator is called Between Two Tigers. Conlon Nancarrow's Study No. 47 Wagner, the new Witness haunting every episode. ! Send us email, share your ideas in the Slack, and catch us at these normal places: Ivan: Mastodon • Website Jimmy: Mastodon • Website Lu: Mastodon • Website See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/072Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcribe →Elephant in the Room
Apr 21, 202402:56:02Tap to summarizeInventing on PrincipleStop Drawing Dead FishThe Future of Programming Yes, all three of them in one episode. Phew! Links $ patreon.com/futureofcoding — Lu and Jimmy recorded an episode about Hest without telling me, and by total coincidence released it on my birthday. Those jerks… make me so happy. Lu's talk at SPLASH 2023: Cellpond: Spatial Programming Without Escape Gary Bernhardt's talk Wat Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor ("""Clean""" Audio) Braid, the good video game from the creator of The Witness David Hellman is the visual artist behind Braid, A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage Is Irreversible, Dynamicland, and… the Braid section of Inventing on Principle. Light Table by Chris Granger Learnable Programming by Bret Victor When Lu says "It's The Line", they're referring to this thing they're working on called Seet (or "see it"), and you can sneak a peek at seet right heet. Paris Fashion Week absolutely struts, and so can you! The Canadian Tuxedo. As the representative of Canada, I can confirm that I own both a denim jacket and denim pants. If you see me at a conference wearing this combo, I will give you a hug. Jimmy runs a personal Lichess data lake. Hot Module Replacement is a good thing. Pygmalion has a lot of juicy silly bits, 'parently. Cuttle is awesome! It's a worthy successor to Apparatus. Toby Schachman, Forrest Oliphant, I think maybe a few other folks too? Crushing it. Oh, and don't miss Toby's episode of this very podcast! Recursive Drawing, another Toby Schachman joint. Screens in Screens in Screens, another Lu Wilson joint. Larry Tesler. Not a fan of modes. Lu writes about No Ideas on their blog, which is actually just a wiki, but it's actually a blog, but it's actually just a garden. When we mention Rich Hickey, we're referring to the talk Simple Made Easy Jacob Collier, ugh. Suffragettes, women advocating for their right to vote, absolutely had a principle. Not sure that we should be directly likening their struggle to what we do in tech. On the other hand, it's good to foster positive movements, to resist incel and other hateful ones. Instead of linking to e/ anything, I'm just gonna link to BLTC for reasons that only make sense to longtime listeners. Stop Writing Dead Programs by Jack Rusher. Jack Rusher? Jack Rusher! It's the fish one, the one with the fish. …Sorry, these aren't actually fish, or something, because they're just drawings. René Magritte is the creator behind La Trahison des Images, origin of "Ceci n'est pas une pipe". Or maybe it was Margit the Fell Omen? Magritte's Words and Images are lovely. Here's an English translation, though its worth taking a look at the original in context. Acousmatic Music Lu has made art with behaviour — various sands, and CellPond, say. Barnaby Dixon? Barnaby Dixon. Barnaby Dixon! Barnaby Dixon!! You can listen to part of Ivan's """Metronome""", if you want. Or you can listen to an early version of the song he's using this metronome to write. Or you can hear snippets of it in the Torn Leaf Zero video (especially the ending). But, like, you could also go make yourself lunch. I recommend mixing up a spicy peanut sauce for your roasted carrots. Shred a bit of cheese, tomato. Toast the bread. Pull the sausages right when the oil starts to spit. Put them straight into the compost. Look at the bottom of the compost bucket. What's down there? It's shiny. Why are you reading this? Why am I writing this? Why do we make thispodcast? Wintergatan — Marble Machine exists Oh, I forgot to add a link to Arroost earlier. You can also watch a pretty good video that is basically an Arroost tutorial, not much to it. There are also some nice examples of things people have made with Arroost. The Rain Room looks pretty cool. It's the exact inverse of how rain works in many video games. YOU MUST PLAY RAIN WORLD. Here's a beautiful demo of a microtonal guitar, and speaking of using complex machines to make music that would be "easier" to make with a computer, here's a microtonal guitar with mechanized frets that can change the tuning dynamically. This entire YT channel is gold. Shane Crowley wrote a lovely blog post about creating music with Arroost. blank.page is a fun experiment in writing with various frictions. Super Meat Boy (the successor to Meat Boy, a Flash game) and Celeste are great examples of communicating tacit knowledge through the design of a simulation. Newgrounds and eBaum's World and Homestar Runner were early examples of (arguably) computer-native media. Hey, here's this episode's requisite link to the T2 Tile Project and Robust-First Computing. I should probably just create a hard-coded section of the episode page template linking to T2, The Witness, and Jack Rusher. The pun-proof Ivan Sutherland made Sketchpad. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planner_(pro...
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