Winer's Back!

This is really good news.

Dave Winer finally comes out with a decent outliner in the browser.

I've been looking for one for a long time. (Thought of trying to write it too, but it's not my speciality. Now you get one from the world's biggest Outlining evangelist.)

This is also great news for Winer himself, I think. As always, he has a lot of crucial ideas for where the web should be going. But for a while it's seemed like the main thing holding him back has been a code-base that's a Windows desktop application. (Which is NOT where either users or developers want to party these days.) The few times I've thought I'd like to look into the open-sourced Frontier / OPML Editor I've been put off by that.

A new browser-based UI (and Javascript-based server?) hopefully means that he'll be able to get more people involved in his code, interacting with his services, and start to have an impact via technology as well as evangelism.

And me, I'm holding on for the OPML export / import ... ahem ... cough ...  GeekWeaver ... cough. ;-)

Bret Victor Showreel

Bret Victor is one of the few programmers for whom it makes sense to release a showreel.

Elm Lang

I must confess, I'm very intrigued by Elm-Lang.

For me there are four virtues :

1) FRP. All the attempts I've seen to graft FRP onto existing languages have looked clunky to me - ahem ... Trellis? - Requiring the explicit definition of special types of fields. This is the kind of thing that I think needs a new language feature, not a new library.

Elm-lang's "lift" looks a much cleaner way of going about it.

2) It's in the browser. That's where code has to run.

3) I like the way that it reunifies the document / graphics structure back into the same file. The problem is not so much that style and content shouldn't be separated. It's that there are more serious divisions of modularity to respect and forcing HTML and JS into different trees of the filing system has typically pushed highly interdependent data-structure and logic too far apart. I like the ability to bring them back together for small programs.

4) Perhaps it's a way to get familiar with and more into Haskell. Obviously it's not full Haskell. But it seems like a way to get more into that mind-set while doing some practical work.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I'd better go and try something ...  :-)

SocialCalc and Javascript

Dan Bricklin gives an update on WikiCalc / SocialCalc (the browser-based spreadsheet he wrote). It seems to be having a new lease of life as a web-app embedded in native Android / iOS apps.

Nice!

Also some interesting news about javascript.

Mind Traffic Control

If you haven't looked at Mind Traffic Control recently (and I know YOU haven't, because I see the logs), then you may be surprised.

Just saying ... :-)

Personal Question

Question : Hey Phil, do you actually do any programming these days?

Answer : Yes. Quite a lot at the moment. Though it's a bit all over the shop.

I'm dipping a toe into Android programming. (And, hmmm ... Java .... I thought I'd got over my Java hangups by doing a lot of Processing, but it turns out that Processing just hides the crap and Android doesn't. Why hasn't Google picked up on Processing to turn it into a first-class Android art / game app. development environment?)

I'm mainly writing CoffeeScript. Some stuff related to my ongoing 3D modelling / desktop manufacturing projects. (Did I forget to mention those? I'm sure there's a half-written blogpost somewhere.) Some work towards an SdiDesk-derived network diagramming plugin for Smallest Federated Wiki (held up by silly problems). Some other bits and pieces. I've recently been playing with Jison, which rocks. And I'm about to investigate angular.js which looks pretty good.

There's a project for small stand-alone web-servers that I'll talk about more if / when it takes off.

I've been trying to compile example VST instruments  (C++) for some of my work with the Brasilia Laptop Orchestra, but it's driving me crazy. (I may go back to Pure Data which can be embedded in a VST.)

A bit of PHP, just simple small web-services.

I'm going to be teaching an Arduino course soon. So I'll be writing a bit of C and I want to try Occam-Ⲡ.

I'm still writing Python too. Mainly for short file transformation scripts or to prototype algorithms that later get translated into CoffeeScript.

Some of this stuff is headed for GitHub soon.

Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails

It's fascinating to read Giles Bowkett on Rails, its bloat, its falling out of fashion.

Fascinating mainly because it so clearly highlights that no-one is immune from this life-cycle that goes :

• new, simpler and easier than anything else
• hot-new thing that everyone loves
• adding more fluff to deal with more edge-cases
• build-up of technical debt
• re-writes to try to make more general, more principled, but requiring more configuration
• old and bloated.

Certainly Python isn't immune. We've been through this cycle with Zope, Plone ... feels like Django has too. Java went through it several times. The node/js/coffeescript frameworks will go through it too. 

DOS/Windows did it. I guess the Macintosh OS has, though Apple have been more willing to kill and reboot its operating systems with the moves to OSX (BSD) and then iOS.

VB.NET

I'm amazed that Microsoft didn't get the VB.NET domain name.

Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language

This is a great essay on what's wrong with Pascal. But really, it's a great essay on what are some of the nice touches of C that makes it such a good language.

Universal Programming Literacy

My answer to a Quora question : What would happen in a world where almost everyone is programming literate?

How might such a world (of universal programming literacy) come about? 

Most likely from a continuing trend to automate the way a lot of work gets done, and then people would learn programming as a way of engaging with that world. 

For example, instead of spending half an hour in the supermarket or even 10 minutes browsing a supermarket site on the web, you might be able to compose an augmented shopping list on your phone. 

6 Apples
4 bread rolls 

Could become : 

"Apples".
   prefer("Pink Lady" or "Fuji").
     take(6).
   otherwise.take(4)

"Bread rolls".
   only("Wholemeal").
     take(4).
     prefer("Top=Poppy Seed")

Deliver("Wednesday")
Order_from( 
   priorities("Waitrose","Asda","Sainsbury","Tesco")

)

Similar little languages can be developed for most activities. So I'd guess that we'll all be writing little scripts for robots or large automated services. There's an assumption that people must prefer navigating rather laborious graphical interfaces to get stuff done. But if they were more programming literate they may learn to use and love such small scripts instead.

Adobe Brackets

Adobe's Bespin-like editor, written in javascript / html.

Sweet. 

Social Media 2012

My comment on Alex's blog :

Well, you already know but I still think wiki has a future, as pointed to by Smallest Federated Wiki. There are some flaws / issues with SFW, mainly I think because not enough people are working on it, but it’s still the signpost for how wiki could evolve. 

Would still love to see you and other UseMod / OddMuse people look at ways to engage, even if you don’t switch over. 

2012 is the year when it just became more and more clear that we need our own space and shouldn’t be dependent on Fb / Tw / G+ etc. 

Fb / Tw / G+ offer two compelling things : 1) an aggregate river of stuff from people we care about, 2) really easy transclusion from various rich media sites. 

We could have a distributed river architecture if we took RSS and some kind of pubsub architecture (eg. RssCloud) seriously. SFW has made transclusion protocols central to its philosophy. If we pick up on both, figure out how to get the most important things we get from the mainstream working smoothly, we can create a compelling alternative on our terms. And one of the interesting, overlooked, facts about G+ is that it showed that significant numbers of people are still willing to experiment with alternatives. As long as you can get a critical mass of around 20 people you care about to use it, G+ is as valuable as anything else. You don’t need 1 billion users. You aren’t trying to take over the world at this point, just to have a syndication / discussion architecture which isn’t owned by THEM.

Recursive Drawing

Recursive Drawing. Nice!

Update : Try it, it's awesome.

Update 2 :

Vi Hart on Making Her Videos

How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make a Video... 

There's something about Vi Hart's recursive video about how she makes her videos which reminds me strongly of the Lispish ideal of having the Lisp interpreter available at write-time, compile-time and run-time.

Plan 9 mounts and dependency injection

Cool.

Do The Simplest Thing

Congratulations to Bill Seitz on launching his Personal Finance startup / project.

My Simulations

Over the years I've done a few agent based simulations to look at questions that interest me.

Here's a quick Bootstrap page to get at them.

Strapdown.js

Very cool : Strapdown.js - Instant and elegant Markdown documents

Dog : A Social Language

Dog seems to be a little language for writing social software.

Initial thoughts :

Big question is what it compiles to. It's about time we had a programming language that compiles a single program down to parts that run on both server and clients, in a really easy and transparent way.

Building in knowledge of protocols like http and json and making services like twitter at least members of the standard library is a good idea.

Like most programmers, I'm sceptical of the  "easy English-like" nature of it. We've had plenty of time to learn that what's hard in programming is the logical thinking not the strange syntax. (Update : See my Quora answer)

But if Dog can become a little-language which makes it easy to configure and administrate social software back-ends then it will be very useful. Particularly if there are ways of compiling the same program down to multiple back-ends (Django, Rails, Chicago Boss etc.)

Project Schema

This is awesome : Project Schema combines mind-mapping with management of parts of a CAD model.