One 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 list goes on.
• Perhaps Tidal Cycles and Strudel are esolangs? Perhaps also the Game of Life?
• Hedy is an unabashed push to do something different!
• Jonathan Richman's He Gave Us The Wine To Taste It is probably my favourite of the various attempts artists have made to plead with their audiences: don't overthink this! (Friends of the show might be familiar with this one.)
• Isomorf let you view your program with your choice of syntax. It's like Hedy, but less humanitarian.
• Poe's Law is not Postel's law

Music used in this episode:

• Two songs from Ivan's Organs.
• One from AG,BO.
• A slice of Diminished Fifth.
• The shortest track of this, the shortest track of that.
• The last song in the episode isn't on the internet, but the demo is.
• Jonathan Richman's He Gave Us The Wine To Taste It

! Send us email, join the FoC community, and find us on-line:

• Iv: 🐘 🦋 🌐
• Jm: 🐘 🦋 🌐
• Lu: 🐘 🦋 🌐

See you in dreamland~

https://feelingof.com/episodes/078/

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A 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/077

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You 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/076

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 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/75

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"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/74

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alexander 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/073

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If 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?"

• @[email protected]: 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/072

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Inventing on Principle
Stop Drawing Dead Fish
The 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. Planner exists.
• The PlayStation 3 Cell processor was this weirdly parallel CPU that was a pain in the butt to program.
• The SpaceMouse

Put all metal back into the ground.

Music featured in this episode:

• Fingers from This Score is Butt Ugly
• The Sailor's Chorus from Wagner's The Flying Dutchman.

! 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/71

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dave Ackley's paper Beyond Efficiency is three pages long. With just these three pages, he mounts a compelling argument against the conventional way we engineer software. Instead of inflexibly insisting upon correctness, maybe allow a lil slop? Instead of chasing peak performance with cache and clever tricks, maybe measure many times before you cut. So in this episode, we're putting every CEO in the guillotine… (oh, that stands for "correctness and efficiency only", don't put us on a list)… and considering when, where, and how to do the robust thing.

Links

$ patreon.com/futureofcoding — The most recent bonus episode is a discussion with Stefan Lesser about new "laws of physics" we can invent inside the computer.

Don't destroy the earth, then make sure your thing can't be destroyed, then don't destroy your data, and finally, do your damn job, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

• A Software Epiphany, and the accompanying HN discussion — giga viral, so sick
• PartyKit? Nice!
• What started as a simple todo list turned into an ocean of tech boy milk and, ultimately, the AI apocalypse.
• Jepsen is a rough, rugged, deeply thoughtful and fantastically cool approach to distributed systems testing, by Kyle Kingsbury. Also, we didn't talk about it, but his reversing / hexing / typing / rewriting / unifying technical interview series is essential reading.
• Ivan's examples of robustness vs efficiency were RAID, the CAP theorem, Automerge, the engineering of FoundationDB, and Byzantine fault tolerance— all of which stake out interesting territory in the efficiency/robustness tradeoff spectrum, all of which are about distributed systems.
• Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?, a paper by John Backus.
• We Don't Really Know How to Compute!, a talk by Gerald Sussman.
• The Robust-First Computing Creed is rock solid.
• The Wikipedia article on von Neumann architecture did not come through with the goods.
• Ivan works with Alex Warth now, and thus may fairly speak in half-truths like "I've been working with constraints recently…"
• The Demon Hoard Sort
• Bogosort is never coming to Dreamberd
• The Witness was made by Jonathan Blow, who has Aphantasia, but he also made a game called Braid, and Braid is good.
• Datamosh is a creative misuse of the lack of robustness that comes from storing diffs instead of full state snapshots. Here's a lovely gallery of examples.
• Abstraction by xkcd
• Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
• Can't let Lu get through the above without derailing onto Fiverr, PCP, Fight Club, and the Dust Brothers.
• Randy Newman was nearly quoted in Ackley's Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation — god help you if you read our show notes and don't listen to the episode.
• "It is difficult", says Upton Sinclair when asked about Jimmy Miller being Jimmy Miller, and how we all ought to approach our own sense of Jimmy Miller.

Music featured in this episode:

• Hawker News by user: spiralganglion
• Corporate World by the Dust Brothers

No more jokes! Find us at these normal places:

• Ivan: Mastodon • Website
• Jimmy: Mastodon • Website
• Lu: Mastodon • Website
• Dave: Mastodon • Website

Send us email, share your ideas in our Slack, and support the show on Patreon. Yes, do all three please.

http://futureofcoding.org/episodes/70

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the spirit of clearly communicating what you're signing up for, this podcast episode is nearly three hours long, and among other things it contains a discussion of a paper by author Mary Shaw titled Myths & Mythconceptions which takes as an organizing principle a collection of myths that are widely believed by programmers, largely unacknowledged, which shape our views on the nature of programming as an activity and the needs of programmers as people and the sort of work that we do as a sort of work, and where by acknowledging these myths the three of us (Mary Shaw primarily, and by extension Jimmy and I, those three people, that's it, no other people appear on this podcast) are able to more vividly grip the image of programming with our mind's eye (or somesuch) and conceive of a different formulation for programming, and in addition to these myths this paper also incudes a number of excellent lists that I take great pleasure in reading, beyond which I should also note that the paper does a job of explaining itself and that hopefully you'll find I've done a similar job, that's the spirit, please enjoy.

Links

$ patreon.com/futureofcoding — I've recently changed it so that there's only 1 instance of the INTERCAL tier available, so if you're interested in those perks you'd better hop on it quick before nobody else does!

• There's also a video, though I haven't watched it.
• Claude Shannon would have something to say about revealing information.
• Top 10 Hits of the End of the World is an album by Prince Rama. Listen to it as loudly as you can on Bandcamp, Spotify, or Apple Music.
• Val Town is the new startup by Future of Coding community founder Steve Krouse
• Ivan recently took a job at Ink & Switch on the "Ink" research track.
• Programmer Bums, or, rather, Computer Bums
• Limmy's Wa
• Retool
• MythBusters
• The Flop House's Final Judgements: Good-Bad, Bad-Bad, Kinda-Like
• CRDT
• Data
• Robust-First Computing is an approach championed by the hero Dave Ackley, and I have a well-informed hunch that you'll be hearing a lot more about it in future episodes.
• The T2 Tile Project is another Ackley joint that, perhaps, works as a wild example of what Mary Shaw means when she talks about an "execution ecosystem".
• Devine's talk at Strange Loop: An approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture
• MUMPS (the medical thing, not to be confused with mumps the medical thing) is used by Epic (the software company, not to be confused with Epic the software company).
• The Glass Cannon podcast network.
• Lu's SPLASH talk Cellpond: Spatial Programming without Escape
• The Turing tarpit
• Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire by Erik Meijer, Maarten Fokkinga, Ross Paterson.
• Richard D. James is the same person as Richard P. (Peter) Gabriel, right?
• Similarly, see Neil Armstrong's work on Erlang (which is popular in telephony, right?).
• The Witness is not going to appear in our show notes.
• Jack Rusher. Jack Rusher? Jack Rusher!
• TrainJam
• Gary Bernhardt's talk Ideology

Nobody remarked on these silly links last time, so this time I'm drawing more attention to them:

• Tode: Neopets • MySpace
• Berd: Angelfire • Orkut
• Bot: Geocities • Friendster

https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/069

Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.