Future of Coding Research Archive

Agenda

• Where are you in the world?
• In NY ever?
• In finland
• Scuttlebutt
• How’s it going?
• How to help?
• Open collective?
• My master plan
• Programming languages
• Prototypes
• Advice on master plan
• People I should talk to?
• FRP for kids?
• Animation
• Reading list?

Notes

• Make things easier
• Adding constraints
• Like Lego
• Advice on strategy
• Hardest part is getting traction - Marketing / growth hacking
  • Making home page
  • README
  • “I don’t know where early cyclejs users came from”
    • Things that helped the adoption
  • Picking the right keywords, buzz words
  • Reactive RxJS Functional VirtualDom
    • Marketing needs to have a big role
  • “How do I deal with people?”
  • “How do I get people to understand?”
  • Needs to be an early dialogue
    • Early adopters
  • Interested in new stuff
  • But ephemeral interest, so need to evolve enough to get next level of developers interested
  • Unintended use cases are key, see how people use things
    • Choose buzzwords to choose target audience
  • When you want to make something for everybody, don’t market it this way in the beginning
  • The late majority doesn’t look for things like them. They just follow the early community
    • Buzzwords not going to help
  • Reactive - 2013-2015
  • But people realizes that this doesn’t mean anything
  • Reactive Manifesto - When it was new it was confusing people and they liked it
  • FRP - would bring a bunch of Haskellers
  • Elm used FRP when Reactive was a buzzword
  • But not sure that will help
  • Spreadsheets
  • AI is a good buzzword
  • Stream is a good buzzword
• How is the world going to be in 10 years from now? - AI could be
  • What would be the accessible computing platform for everyone be using AI?
    • Blockstack could be

• When choosing a paradigm, there are not that many options -

  • http://wiki.c2.com/?ThereAreExactlyThreeParadigms
  • Does not exist - requires AI?
  • “Please do what I want”
  • Turn off the light
  • Make it cozy
  • Put on a nice movie
  • Humans don’t like dealing with someone that’s pedantic
  • Elm is pedantic with British culture: nice when it corrects you
  • TODO think about the upsides and downsides of each paradigm
  • FP - Difficulty of expressing things in unfamiliar way
  • Logic programming - Explosion of search space so things are slow - Precision
  • Don’t necessarily need AI
  • That’s logic programming
  • The computer could guess what you mean with defaults
  • In the future you could guess with AI
  • Could also crowdsource these default values
  • One option is a conversational
  • Chat bot style
  • Human programmers are like this currently
  • “Expert systems” AI
    • For detecting diseases
    • TODO figure out why this was abandoned?
    • Maybe because you have to add all the questions by hand - Functional programming and logic programming Hybrid
  • (Relation is generalization of a function if you allow relations inside functional program)
  • Picks some default values
  • Maps from output back to input
• Advice on how I spend my time - First a chaotic period
  • Very hacky
  • And this is good
  • Keep this so you can quickly experiment with ideas
  • Try not to make it a process or too formal too early
    • Make sure you really define a use case
  • Make games
  • Eve - help companies that have a lot of spreadsheets
    • Make a hacky tool that maximizes value for that use case and customer
    • Don’t be afraid to make it hacky that delivers value quickly
    • Use Typescript, not JavaScript
  • Will be easier to refactor with a typed language
    • Spend more time with the problem
  • Not with the solution
  • This is what the problem is / this is how the problem looks
  • Get a shape of it
  • Then you’ll see what the solution is
  • Need more than a vague idea of it
  • ** TODO THINK ABOUT THIS**
  • It’s only after 248 comments they found a solution here
  • https://github.com/staltz/cycle-onionify/issues/28 - Make simple things so people can give feedback on small details
• CycleJS roadmap for next year
• Move away from functional and reactive buzzwords

• Abstraction behind: stream graph - Don’t even need to say that the nodes are streams

• Use case for reactive Scratch is there
• But might take more time
• Could make this more small
• Would be able to iterate faster on text
• But how novel would the library be or just use existing
• Is this just fran? - Glitch avoidance
  • Happens when you do a combine
  • Systems need to have an idea of what’s “happening at the same time”
  • CycleJS doesn’t have this
  • Provides absolute guarantees everywhere
  • But glitches rarely happen when you allow them and there are ways of solving them
  • https://staltz.com/rx-glitches-arent-actually-a-problem.html
• What should I read or look up? - https://ds300.github.io/derivablejs/
  • Similar to mobX
  • https://mobx.js.org/ - Often described as spreadsheets - Plugging one thing for another - Allow people to change things imperatively
  • They do avoid glitches
  • Allow you to give “same time” at pragmatic level
    • http://www.di.ens.fr/~pouzet/bib/chap_lucid_synchrone_english_iste08.pdf
  • One of the only dataflow languages
  • Recommended from Evan from Elm
  • Notion of things happening at the same time: synchronous
• Conal Elliott - He’s solving for good garuntees in 100% of cases - As opposed to 98% like CycleJS - So feels like wasted effort to provide guarantees for 2%
• Woof vs Scratch
• There is great respect for Scratch
• Does blockly exist? - Showed cycle v2
• Blockly or scratch descibes imperitive with nested commands
• CycleJS stream graph as IDE - Some parts are not part of the graph
• Declarative scratch with blockly - Two different tools and you could use them together in a bigger tool
  • One is declarative
  • One is imperative
• One of the most important building blocks - ** Scratch-like thing but for evaluation**
  • ** Expression editor**
  • ** Blockly alternative**
  • ** TODO THINK MORE ABOUT THIS**
  • ** Is the most important problem to solve now?**
    • ** This could improve things for kids by a lot**
    • ** Could be used in a lot of projects**
  • ** How to build this?**
    • ** Do this on SVG**
    • ** Can do custom**
    • ** SVG and HTML**
    • ** Maybe just use React because good error**
    • ** CycleJS uses typeerrors**
    • ** Elm has great errors**
    • Elm blockly that writes elm that you teach to kids
  • Then from that something else grows
• Should I work on http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/? - Symbolic computing - But only useful for math - This but for update functions so it wouldn’t look like this?
  • Look like Cycle v2
• Like this https://pumpula.net/foolproof-html/?
• Compile to cyclejs

• Typescript? No that would be weird

• What to work on next?
• Streamsheets - no, too much unknown
• Blockly for Elm or CycleJS - Could spend an hour here thinking about how to
• Expression editor - Legible mathematics - Foolproof html - Thing to go inside every other app I ever made in this space
  • Also go inside spreadsheet expressions
  • Basically like codemirror but for expressions
    • Could eventually turn into a blockly alternative
  • Which I could then use to make into a UI for cycle or elm or anything
  • Need to think about why building elm blockly or cyclejs blockly doesn’t work
  • Maybe has to do with sequential nature of the blocks vs how they fit inside each other
  • Think about how to make this infinitely customizable - Question: is this the highest leverage thing to build now?
  • Can always approximate with VBA expressions or like with what aprt.us has
    • Next steps
  • Good extensive googling to see if this exists
  • Compile a list of similar things, like aprt.us, google sheets, what numbers on mac does, soulver, etc
  • https://github.com/viskell/viskell
  • Think about the projectional editor tradeoffs
  • Lamdu
  • Isomorph
• FRP WoofJS - Read
  • https://ds300.github.io/derivablejs/
  • Similar to mobX - https://mobx.js.org/
    • Often described as spreadsheets
    • Plugging one thing for another
    • Allow people to change things imperatively
  • They do avoid glitches
  • Allow you to give “same time” at pragmatic level
  • http://www.di.ens.fr/~pouzet/bib/chap_lucid_synchrone_english_iste08.pdf
  • One of the only dataflow languages
  • Recommended from Evan from Elm
  • Notion of things happening at the same time: synchronous
  • https://www.pyret.org/
    • Make some games
• What to work on this week
• Getting feedback on master plan and what to work on next
• Continue developing plans for ideas of things to work on next - Marinate in problem - Think through solutions