Feeling of Computing

Jimmy Miller joins the show as co-host. Together, we embark on a new series of episodes covering the most influential and interesting papers in the history of our field. Some of these papers led directly to where we are today, and their influence cannot be overstated. Others were overlooked or unloved in their day, and we revive them out of curiosity and wonder. A few even hint at an inspiring fut...

Today's guest is Ella Hoeppner , who first came onto the radar of our community back in the fall when she released a web-based visual Clojure editor called Vlojure , with a captivating introduction video . I was immediately interested in the project because of the visual style on display — source code represented as nested circles; an earthy brown instead of the usual dark/light theme. But a...

Scott Anderson has spent the better part of a decade working on end-user programming features for VR and the metaverse. He's worked on playful creation tools in the indie game Luna, scripting for Oculus Home and Horizon Worlds at Facebook, and a bunch of concepts for novel programming interfaces in virtual reality. Talking to Scott felt a little bit like peeking into what's coming around the bend...

The name Replit will be familiar to regular listeners of our show. The backstory and ambitions behind the project, however, I bet will be news to you. Amjad Masad , the founder and first programmer of Replit, is interviewed by Steve Krouse in this episode from the vault — recorded back in 2019, released for the first time today. Amjad shares the stories of how he taught himself to use a comp...

In this episode, I'll be talking to Toby Schachman , who many of you are surely familiar with thanks to an incredible string of projects he's released over the past decade, including Recursive Drawing back in 2012, Apparatus in 2015, and most recently Cuttle which opened to the public this past week. All of these projects superficially appear to be graphics editors, but by interacting with them yo...

Mary Rose Cook is a programmer with.. just.. so many side projects, oh my — and, she works at Airtable . Mary created Gitlet , a version of Git in 1000 lines of JavaScript with extensive annotation. That might be her most well-known project, but of particular interest to our community are her programming environments Isla and Code Lauren . These projects explore syntax, learnability, executi...

Ravi Chugh is a (recently-tenured 🎉) prof at the University of Chicago. He’s famous for leading the Sketch-n-Sketch project, an output-directed , bidirectional programming tool that lets you seamlessly jump back and forth between coding and directly manipulating your program’s output. The tool gives you two different projected editing interfaces for the same underlying program, so tha...

"Metaphors are important here." There's a small handful of people that I've been requested again and again to interview on the Future of Coding podcast. Jennifer Jacobs is one of those people. Her work on Dynamic Brushes in particular, and parametric drawing in general, occupies a major intersection between disciplines and provides insights that we can all apply to our own work. This interview tou...

Miller Puckette created "The Patcher" Max (the precursor to Max/MSP ), and later Pure Data , two of the most important tools in the history of visual programming and computer music. Max was designed by Miller in the mid-1980s as an aid to computer-music composers who wanted to build their own dynamic systems without needing write C code. Max had no facility for sound generation at first, but that...

This was originally meant to be a little mini-episode halfway through March, with the next full episode coming at the start of April. Would you believe me if I told you that some things happened in the world that caused me to change my plans? Shocker, I know. Well, it's finally here. In today's episode, I'll reflect and commentate on the results of the first ever Future of Coding Community Survey....

Orca is a visual programming environment for making music. Except it's not graphical, it's just text arranged in a grid. Except it doesn't actually make music, it just silently emits digital events across time. When you first see it, it's utterly alien. When you start to learn how it works and why, the logic of it all snaps into place, and it becomes a thrilling case study for authors of live prog...

We live in a world that is gradually becoming more closed off, more controlled, more regional. Our relationship with technology is now primarily one of consumption, buying new hardware on a regular cycle, using software conceptualized to meet a market need and fulfill promises made to venture capitalists. It's common to hear people talk about both computing hardware and software as though they wer...

Last Monday, Ellen Chisa and Paul Biggar unveiled Dark , a new web-based programming environment for creating backend web services. In these conversations, first with Ellen and then with Paul, we discuss how they met, conceived of the idea, iterated on the product, and what their long-term vision is for the product. Dark is a web-based, structured editor with a data store built-in. It's code has a...

"The world's been divided into people who can make software, and the people who use software all day, and basically we think that that paradigm is not a good one. It feels kind of broken," says Lane Shackleton, Head of Product at Coda, where they are building a new kind of document that blurs the line between users and programmers.  A Coda document starts out looking like a familiar online do...

Ivan Reese guest hosts. I've been intimidated by Jack Rusher from the first blush. I mean, he's wearing a high-collared fur coat and black sunglasses in his Twitter pic, and his bio includes "Bell Labs Researcher". So when tasked with choosing a subject for my first interview, I immediately reached out to him, leaning in to my nervousness. His reply included the detail that he's "generally hostile...

This episode explores the intersections between various flavors of math and programming, and the ways in which they can be mixed, matched, and combined. Michael Arntzenius, "rntz" for short, is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham building a programming language that combines some of the best features of logic, relational, and functional programming. The goal of the project is "to find a...

Usually when we think of mathematics and programming languages, we think of tedious, didactic proofs that have nothing to do with our day to day experience of programming. And when we think of developer tools, we picture the practical, imperfect tools we use every day: text editors, build systems, libraries, etc. Cyrus Omar is new computer science professor at the University of Michigan bridging t...

Hillel Wayne is a technical writer and consultant on a variety of formal methods, including TLA+ and Alloy. In this episode, Hillel gives a whirlwind tour of the 4 main flavors of formal methods, and explains which are practical today and which we may have to wait patiently for. The episode begins with a very silly joke from Steve (about a radioactive Leslie Lamport) and if you make it to the end...

Jonathan Edwards is an independent researcher working on drastically simplifying programming for beginners. He is known for his  Subtext  series of programming language experiments and his  Alarming Development  blog. He has been a researcher at MIT CSAIL and CDG/HARC. He tweets  @jonathoda . Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing See omnystudio....

Tudor Girba builds tools and techniques for improving the productivity and happiness of software teams. He currently works on the Glamorous Toolkit, a "moldable development environment" for Pharo, that developers can easily adopt to suit their needs. Tudor is a self-proclaimed "software environmentalist", sounding the alarm about how quickly we create code, and how slowly we recycle it. https://fu...

Vlad Magdalin is the CEO & co-founder of Webflow, a WYSIWYG website builder and CMS that's a thin layer of abstratction over HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this conversation we discussed Vlad's Bret Victor origin story, the differences between live programming and direct manipulation, and why web design has resisted direct manipulation pro tools for so long. You can find the transcript for this...

Katherine Ye is a PhD student at CMU, where she works on representation, including programming languages, visualizations, notations, and interfaces to enable thinking and creating. She's been affiliated with MIT CSAIL, Princeton, Distill at Google Brain, and the Recurse Center. In this conversation we discuss Penrose, her project to _democraize visual intuition_. Katherine envisions "a magical mac...

If you haven’t been following my research journey, this episode is a great place to join! I recap of who I am, where I come from, what I’m trying to accomplish, and how I hope to accomplish it. The mission of this project is, broadly, to “democratize” programming. My new phrase is: Enable all people to modify they software they use in the course of using it. This mission wo...

Quinn Slack of Sourcegraph believes in low-hanging fruit. Before we improve programming in all the fancy ways, he has a list of all the little improvements and features we need to make available to all developers, such as jump-to-definition, autocomplete, and automatic formatting. In this conversation, we learn about the technical challenges to brining code intelligence to all editors, and Sourceg...

Two years ago, Nadia Eghbal "stumbled onto the internet's biggest blindspot": sustainability of open-source. Her Ford Foundation report "Roads and Bridges" became an instant classic. She shined a light on the underappreciated roles of maintainers and how difficult it was for even vital projects to get enough funding for a single person full time. In this conversation, we discuss how she found "stu...