Future of Coding

• Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing (feat. Felienne Hermans)

  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/076Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  --------  

  2:11:38
• A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans

  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/75Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  --------  

  2:04:08
• Is the Whole Universe a Computer™?

  "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/74Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  --------  

  2:12:30
• Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning

  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/073Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  --------  

  2:44:27
• Pygmalion by David C. Smith

  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/072Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcodingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  --------  

  3:09:39

More Technology podcasts

Trending Technology podcasts

About Future of Coding