Feeling of Computing

The subject of this episode's paper — Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler — is one of those grand ideas that makes you want to go stargazing. To stare out into space and just disassociate from your body and become one with the heavens. Everything — life, space, time, existence — all of it is a joke! A cosmic ribbing delivered by the laws of the universe or some higher power or, perhaps, higher order. Humanity waited two thousand years, from the time of the ancient Greeks through until the 1930s, for a means to answer questions of calculability, when three suddenly arrived all at once: General recursive functions by Gödel in 1934, with functions of sets of natural numbers. Lambda calculus by Alonzo Church in 1936, with anonymous single-variable functions. Turing machines by Alan Turing in 1937, with a process for evaluating symbols on a tape. Then it was discovered that these three models of computation were, in fact, perfectly equivalent. That any statement made in one could be made in the others. A striking coincidence, sure, but not without precedent. But then it was quietly determined (in 1934, again in 1969, and finally published in 1980) that computation itself is in a direct correspondence with logic. That every proposition in a given logic corresponds with a type in a given programming language, every proof corresponds with a program, and the simplification of the proof corresponds with the evaluation of the program. The implications boggle the mind. How could this be so? Well, how could it be any other way? Why did it take so long to discover? What other discoveries like this are perched on the precipice of revelation? Philip Wadler is here to walk us through this bit of history, suggest answers to some of these questions, and point us in a direction to search for more. And we are here, dear listener, to level with you that a lot of this stuff is miserably hard to approach, presented with the symbols and language of formal logic that is so often inscrutable to outsiders. By walking you through Wadler's paper (and the much more approachable Strange Loop talk), and tying it in with the cultural context of modern functional programming, we hope you'll gain an appreciation for this remarkable, divine pun that sits beneath all of computation. Links => patreon.com/futureofcoding — but only if you back the Visual Programming tier!! I'm warning you! Wadler's Strange Loop talk Propositions as Types Cocoon is good. It's not, like, Inside or Limbo good, but it's good. Actually, just play Inside. Do that ASAP. Hollow Knight, also extremely good. Can't wait for Silksong. But seriously, if you're reading this and have haven't played Inside, just skip this episode of the podcast and go play Inside. It's like 3 hours long and it's, like, transformatively great. Chris Martens has done some cool work (eg) bringing together linear logic and games. Meh: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter Yeh: Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker Heh: To Mock a MockingBird by Raymond Smullyan. The hierarchy of automata Games: Agency as Art The Incredible Proof Machine is what some would call a "visual programming language" because proofs are programs. But it's actually really cool and fun to play with. Approach it like a puzzle game, and give it 10 minutes or so to get its hooks into you. "Stop Doing Logic" is part of the Stop Doing Math meme. Unrelated: Ivan's song Don't Do Math. Bidirectional Type Checking, a talk by David Christiansen List Out of Lambda, a blog post by Steve Losh Nobody noticed that these links were silly last time, so this time I'm drawing more attention to it: Ivan: Mastodon • Email Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter This link is legit: DM us in the FoC Slack https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/068Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This community is a big tent. We welcome folks from all backgrounds, and all levels of experience with computers. Heck, on our last episode, we celebrated an article written by someone who is, rounding down, a lawyer! A constant question I ponder is: what's the best way to introduce someone to the world of FoC? If someone is a workaday programmer, or a non-programmer, what can we share with them to help them understand our area of interest? A personal favourite is the New Media Reader, but it's long and dense. An obvious crowd-pleaser is Inventing on Principle. Bonnie Nardi's A Small Matter of Programming deserves a place on the list, especially if the reader is already an avid programmer who doesn't yet understand the point of end-user programming. They might ask, "Why should typical computer users bother learning to program?" Well, that's the wrong question! Instead, we should start broader. Why do we use computers? What do we use them to do? What happens when they don't do what we want? Who controls what they do? Will this ever change? What change do we want? Nardi challenges us to explore these questions, and gives the reader a gentle but definitive push in a positive direction. Next time, we're… considered harmful? #### $ We have launched a Patreon! => patreon.com/futureofcoding If, with the warmth in your heart and the wind in your wallet, you so choose to support this show then please know that we are tremendously grateful. Producing this show takes a minor mountain of effort, and while the countless throngs of adoring fair-weather fans will surely arrive eventually, the small kilo-cadre of diehard listeners we've accrued so far makes each new episode a true joy to share. Through thick and thin (mostly thin since the sponsorship landscape turned barren) we're going to keep doing our darnedest to make something thought-provoking with an independent spirit. If that tickles you pink, throw some wood in our fireplace! (Yes, Ivan is writing this, how can you tell?) Also, it doesn't hurt that the 2nd bonus episode — "Inherently Spatial" — is one of the best episodes of the show yet. It defrags so hard; you'll love it. #### Init Bug report: Frog Fractions. Oh the indignity! Hey, it's The Witness in our show notes again. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is the better game, even if it spawned Only Up and other copycats that miss the point. The Looker gets the point. Getting Over It is a triumph that emerged from a genre of games that are hard to play: Octodad, QWOP, I Am Bread Braid arguably spawned the genre of high-minded & heady puzzlers that all try to say something profound through their design. Cookie Clicker and Universal Paperclips are good incremental games. Jump King and Only Up are intentionally bad. Flappy Bird was accidentally good. Surgeon Simulator and Goat Simulator are purely for the laughs. Stanley Parable, like Getting Over It, brings in the voice of the creator to (say) invite rumination on the fourth wall, which is what make them transcendent. Here's the trailer for Bennett Foddy's new game, Baby Steps. So on the one hand we have all these "bad" and """bad""" and sometimes badgames, which actually end up doing quite well in advancing the culture. On the other hand we have The Witness, The Talos Principal, Swapper, Antichamber, QUBE, and all these high-minded puzzly games, which despite their best efforts to say something through their design… kinda don't. When comparing the "interactivity" of these games, it's tempting to talk about the mechanics (or dynamics), but that formal definition feels a little too precise. We mean something looser — something closer to the colloquial meaning when "Gamers" talk about "game mechanics". Silent Football might be an example of "sports as art". Mao is a card game where explaining the rules is forbidden. #### Main The Partially Examined Life is one of Jimmy's favourite philosophy podcasts. Two essays from Scientific American's 1991 Special Issue Communications, Computers and Networks are referenced in the first chapter, one by Larry Tesler and one by Alan Kay. The other essays in this issue are also quite interesting to reflect on from our position 30 years hence. Apple's Knowledge Navigator video, and HP's 1995 video, are speculative fiction marketing about conversational agents. Rewind.ai is one of those "Computer, when did I last degauss the tachyon masticator?" tools. (Oh, Lifestreams…) S-GPT is Federico Viticci's iOS/Mac Shortcut that strings together ChatGPT and various Shortcuts features, so that you can do some nifty automation stuff via a conversational interface. It feels like similar things could be built — heck, probably already have been built — with "If-Tuh-Tuh-Tuh" or Zapier. When Ivan reaches for domain-specific terminology, LUT, Arri Alexa, and Redcome easily because, like, he wishes he had occasion to use them. To hear the story about the Secret Service busting down young Jimmy's door, listen to his episode on the Code With Jason podcast. C Is Not a Low-level Language — a fantastic article about the illusion that our source code closely matches what actually happens during execution. What Follows from Empirical Software Research? Not much, according to Jimmy in this delightful article. Jimmy likes to reference Minecraft's "redstone" which acts a bit like a programming system, so here, have a video about redstone. Ivan saw this video via Mastodon, about someone making a "real" camera in Blender, and… just… 🤯 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9rEQAGpLw Jimmy's orchestra struggled with an inappropriately formal approach to Coldplay's Viva La Vida. Knuth's up-arrow notation One meaning of "end-user programming" is about allowing people to build their own software. Another is about modifying existing software, and here are two interesting links related to this second meaning: sprout.place is a lovely website where you decorate a little virtual space together with some remote friends. It's like a MySpace page mashed-up with a Zoom hang, but better. Geoffrey Litt is a researcher who has tackled both meanings of EUP, but his work on the second meaning is especially interesting. For instance: he worked on Riffle, which explored the consequences of putting the full state of an app inside a reactive database, which is especially interesting if you consider what can be done if this database is available to, rather than hidden from, the end user. To the best of our recollection, Jonathan Edwards has advocated for "end-programmer programming" as a helpful step toward end-user programming. Get in touch, ask us questions, please no more mp3s ahh I can still hear the bones yuck: Ivan: Mastodon • Email Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter DM us in the FoC Slack Support the show on Patreon lol stands for "lots of love" https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/066Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a normal episode of a podcast called Future of Coding. We talk about INTERCAL, a real tool for computer programming. [Do I need to say more? Will this sell it? Most people won’t have heard of INTERCAL, but I think the fake out “normal” is enough to draw their attention. Also, I find “computer programming” funny. Not sure why I put that in quotes.] Links [at least, the ones I remembered to jot down] The final Strange Loop is coming up this September. Ivan and Jimmy will both be there, though—late breaking news—neither of them will be giving a talk. (“Rocket Rules” apply, if you know what that is.) [Will anyone actually know what “Rocket Rules” is? Will they search for it? That would be sort of embarrassing for me.] If Ivan were to give a programming talk, getting some flood-contaminated gear from DEC or a PDP-11 to use as staging / set dressing might be a challenge. [Yay, another retread of my personal history. Maybe instead of dredging up my past I should be the sort of person who makes new things, like, ever.] Meowmeowbeenz [Gah this show hasn’t aged well. At least I’m sticking to the whole “high-brow + low-brow” personal identity by including the reference to it. [Is “meta” low-brow at this point?]] There’s lots of talk about esolangs (esoteric programming languages), so it’s worth linking the Esolang Wiki. [I worry that we spent too much time focusing on surface syntax. Jimmy tried to get us to talk about the beautifully-weird semantics within INTERCAL, but we never fully went there. I’m sure some people will complain about this lack of depth. Not looking forward to that.] In particular, Brainfuck, which Jimmy adorably refers to as “BF” because he’s a polite gentleman and Ivan is 2% South Park. [Laughing at my own joke.] Also, Shakespeare and Shakespeare: vaulting ambition, Out, damned spot, both from the Scottish play (you don’t know where I am, don’t @ me). [Why are these in the show notes? Am I trying to signal some sort of theatre-literacy? Who cares?] “COMEFROM was eventually implemented in the C-INTERCAL variant of the esoteric programming language INTERCAL” [Considering that this was such a non-element in the original paper, it’s weird that it became such a cornerstone of the episode. “What if we recreated the spirit of the paper in the podcast itself” is a tall order, so I guess we did what we could with what we had. Also, I bet someone is going to object that the paper and language aren’t actually very meta, especially not multiple layers deep, to which I’ll reply: we all bring the flavour of our mouth to the soup we taste.] Exapunks… Yeah! [Speaking of things that haven’t aged well… woof. I like our newer episodes better. Especially this one. THAT’S JUST BAIT FOR THE PEOPLE WHO WILL COMPLAIN THAT THIS SHOW HAS GONE OFF THE RAILS, PLEASE DO CONTINUE TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW.] Our tier list was created in tldraw, because it’s the best. [I wish someone applied Steve-and-co’s eye for detail to a visual programming tool. I wish I had time.] The excellent Advent of Computing podcast did an episode on INTERCAL. (Aside: the AoC website seems a bit busted in non-Chrome browsers, so here’s a backup YouTube link, but you can also just search for Advent of Computing in your podcast player of choice.) [AoC is the exception that proves the rule: there are no high-quality programming podcasts. They all seem so low-effort, made by people who don’t respect the listener’s time and attention. Or they’re aping the high-budget NPR style, with no personality. Also, audio quality is all over the map. Also, just the worst garbage ads and theme music, all of them! I wonder if it’s just a cost-benefit time/energy tradeoff, or maybe people don’t know how to do better? I wonder what we could do to help raise the bar, without opening ourselves up to a bunch of “well I don’t like your podcast either” presumed competitiveness.] The video Screens in Screens in Screens is fantastic, and the sort of thing that deserves our support. Also, Lu Wilson (the human behind TodePond) has their own programming language that will not be named on podcasts, DreamBerd, which uses the ! to great effect. [Meta-commentary intentionally left blank.] Some of the music featured in this episode: All Caps by MF DOOM and Madlib [I don’t even like it when other podcasts include music clips, but then away I go needle-dropping like I’ve got something to prove.] Various songs from Ivan’s old albums. [I need to update my website. I need to tweak my static site generator. I need to redesign all the CSS. I need to consider putting all my projects into a database so I can generate nicer indexes. I also need to make some new projects — especially music.] Get in touch, ask us questions, send us the sound of your knuckles cracking: Ivan: Mastodon • Email [If you don’t have something nice to say, know that I’m very sensitive and nurse wounds for a long time. Also, Nurse With Wound is great.] Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter [Jimmy doesn’t write these notes so I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I can imagine: a horse galloping in the wind, Jimmy riding shirtless on the horse, Jimmy holding a gigantic tome of philosophical wisdom in one hand, the other outstretched before him, words of revelation flowing from his mouth like honey, “Ivan, the setup to this joke was lame”] Or just DM us in the FoC Slack. [<3] https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/064Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jimmy and I have each read this paper a handful of times, and each time our impressions have flip-flopped between "hate it so much" and "damn that's good". There really are two sides to this one. Two reads, both fair, both worth discussing: one of them within "the frame", and one of them outside "the frame". So given that larger-than-normal surface for discursive traversal, it's no surprise that this episode is, just, like, intimidatingly long. This one is so, so long, friends. See these withered muscles and pale skin? That's how much time I spent in Ableton Live this month. I just want to see my family. No matter how you feel about Brooks, our thorough deconstruction down to the nuts and bolts of this seminal classic will leave you holding a ziplock bag full of cool air and wondering to yourself, "Wait, this is philosophy? And this is the future we were promised? Well, I guess I'd better go program a computer now before it's too late and I never exist." For the next episode, we're reading a fish wearing a bathrobe. Sorry, it's late and I'm sick, and I have to write something, you know? Links: Fred Brooks also wrote the Mythical Man-Month, which we considered also discussing on this episode but thank goodness we didn't. Also, Fred Brooks passed away recently. We didn't mention it on the show, but it's worth remarking upon. RIP, and thanks for fighting the good fight, Fred. I still think you're wrong about spatial programming, but Jimmy agrees with you, so you can probably rest easy since between the two of us he's definitely the more in touch with the meaning of life. The Oxide and Friends podcast recorded an episode of predictions. Jimmy’s Aphantasia motivates some of his desire for FoC tools. Don’t miss the previous episode on Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building, since Ivan references it whilst digging his own grave. Jimmy uses Muse for his notes, so he can highlight important things in two colors — yes, two colors at the same time. Living in the future. For the Shadow of the Colossus link, here’s an incredible speedrun of the game. Skip to 10:20-ish for a great programming is like standing on the shoulders of a trembling giant moment. Mu is a project by Kartik Agaram, in which he strips computing down to the studs and rebuilds it with a more intentional design. “Running the code you want to run, and nothing else.” “Is it a good-bad movie, a bad-bad movie, or a movie you kinda liked?” Ivan did some research. Really wish Marco and Casey didn't let him. Jimmy did an attack action so as to be rid of Brook’s awful invisibility nonsense. Awful. As promised, here’s a link in the show notes to something something Brian Cantrill, Moore’s Law, Bryan Adams, something something. Dynamicland, baby! Here’s just one example of the racist, sexist results that current AI tools produce when you train them on the internet. Garbage in, garbage out — a real tar pit. AI tools aren’t for deciding what to say; at best, they’ll help with how to say it. Gray Crawford is one of the first people I saw posting ML prompts what feels like an eternity ago, back when the results all looked like blurry goop but like… blurry goop with potential. Not sure of a good link for Jimmy’s reference that Age of Empires II used expert systems for the AI, but here’s a video that talks about the AI in the game and even shows some Lisp code. Idris is a language that has a bit of an “automatic programming” feel. The visual programming that shall not be named. When people started putting massive numbers of transistors into a single chip (eg: CPU, RAM, etc) they called that process Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI). Also, remember that scene in the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire when the hunky Steve Jobs-looking guy said "VLSI" to impress the girl from the only good episode of Black Mirror? I'm still cringing. Sally Haslanger is a modern day philosopher and feminist who works with accident and essence despite their problematic past. Music featured in this episode: Never, a song I wrote and recorded on Tuesday after finally cleaning my disgusting wind organ. It was like Hollow Knight in there. Get in touch, ask us questions, send us old family recipes: Ivan: Mastodon • Email Jimmy: Mastodon • Twitter Or just DM us in the FoC Slack. futureofcoding.org/episodes/062Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before the time-travelling talks, the programmable rooms, the ladders and rocket launchers, we had the first real Bret Victor essay: Magic Ink. It set the stage for Bret's later explorations, breaking down the very idea of "software" into a few key pieces and interrogating them with his distinct focus, then clearly demoing a way we could all just do it better. All of Bret's works feel simultaneously like an anguished cry and a call to arms, and this essay is no exception. For the next episode, we're reading Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur, with a little bit of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind thrown in for good measure. Links Four Hundred of the most Chart-Topping Thoughts of All Time: Inventing On Principal Stop Drawing Dead Fish Drawing Dynamic Visualizations Dynamicland Paper Programs by JP Posma was inspired by Dynamicland. "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." from Halt and Catch Fire Charticulator is Microsoft Research's take on a _Drawing Dynamic Visualizations_-esq tool. Jimmy's Fender Jazz bass looks like this, but red, but like a decade older, but like $600 at the time. We could probably post parts of this episode as Boyfriend Roleplay on YouTube. Fitts's Law is but one thing we've learned about the industrial design aspect of building good software. The Witness is a game where communicating ideas through (essentially) graphic design is the whole entire point of the game. If you haven't played it, know that it comes highly recommended by plenty of folks in the community. A "red letter Bible" is a Bible in which the words spoken by Jesus are colored red, to make them easier to identify. Toph Tucker has a pretty cool personal website. It's rare to see these sorts of sites nowadays, and they're always made by adventuresome programmers, trendy design agencies, or their clients. In the Flash era, it felt like everyone had a website like this, for better and for worse. tldraw is a beautiful little browser-based drawing tool by Steve Ruiz. What few things it does, it does exceptionally well. John while Henry had had had had had had had had had been my preference. #devlog-together is the channel on our Future of Coding slack community where members post small, frequent updates about what they're working on. The (Not Boring) apps are arguably a counterpoint to Bret's theses about information apps and harmful interaction, where the interaction and graphic design are balanced against being maximally-informative, toward being silly and superfluous, to great effect. Did you know there's a hobby horse, but also a hobby horse? I didn't! There are a few examples of folks doing FoC work that, in Ivan's view, align well with the values Bret outlines in Magic Ink: Szymon Kaliski's projects for Ink & Switch, summarized in his Strange Loop talk, Programmable Ink. Mock Mechanics is an environment for building mechanisms by Felipe Reigosa. PANE by Josh Horowitz inverts the usual node-wire programming pattern by putting data in the nodes and data transformation in the wires. Robot Odyssey was a 1984 game for the Apple II (and some other, lesser systems) in which players would go inside various robots to reprogram them. Music featured in this episode: Wash Machine, from the unfinished 2014 album Sneaky Dances Shaun's Amaj Rebirth, created in November 2022 for a friend named — you guessed it — Shaun. Hey! Send us questions we can answer on the show. Like, "How do you keep bread warm?" Or, "What's so great about concatenative languages?" We'll answer them. Send them here: Jimmy Ivan Or just DM one of us in the FoC Slack. futureofcoding.org/episodes/060Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today we're discussing the so-called "incommensurability" paper: The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel. In the pre-show, Jimmy demands that Ivan come right out and explain himself, and so he does, to a certain extent at least. In the post-show, Jimmy draws such a thick line between programming and philosophy that it wouldn't even look out of place on Groucho Marx's face. Next episode, we will be covering the Worse is Better family of thought products, so take 15 minutes to read these three absolute bangers if you'd like to be ahead of the game: The Rise of Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel Worse is Better is Worse, definitely not by Richard P. Gabriel Is Worse Really Better? by Richard P. Gabriel Links Phlogiston Theory Phlogiston the excellent chiptune musician. Bright Eyes - First Day of My Life, by Conor Oberst. Not to be confused with Conal Elliott, who introduced the original meaning of functional reactive programming in his work on Fran. Peter Gabriel - Games Without Frontiers Pilot: A Step Toward Man-Computer Symbiosis Jimmy's talk Paradigms Without Progress: Kuhnian Reflections on Programming Practice There's some sporadic discussion of Philip Wadler (who Ivan playfully calls "Phil"), specifically his claim that programming languages have some bits that are invented and some bits that are discovered. While we're here, make sure you've seen the best 15 seconds in Strange Loop history. Peter Naur's Programming as Theory Building Sponsors CarrotGrid — They don't have a web presence (weird, hey?) but they're working on an interesting problem at the intersection of data, so listen to the short ad in the episode to find out more. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital — Instead of running our usual sponsors today, we'd like to direct your attention to this humanitarian cause. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and our friends (can we call them that?) at Relay.fm are running a pledge drive. If you have any spare coins in your couch cushions, or a few million left over from your last exit, you'd be hard pressed to find a more deserving way to invest them. Donate here. Show notes for this episode can be found at futureofcoding.org/episodes/58Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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