I've been working for a while on some new ideas around the future of programming, but I haven't done a great job of sharing these with the world. It's not science if you don't publish your results, so here we go.

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I'm happy to announce Filament 0.4. If the previous release was about new language features, this one is about apis and docs. A language isn't useful if you don't have APIs to do stuff with.

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I’ve been working a lot on new graphics apis, and new examples to exercise those apis. Things like turtle graphics, which are great for learning recursive functions, and image pixel processing, which are super fun and closer to Raytracing and GPU shaders than you might realize. However, along the way, I’ve discovered some missing features that have forced me to make some tough decisions. Today let’s talk about conditionals, jumps, and lambdas.

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I'm happy to show you the next release of Filament, my humanist programming language designed for kids and scientists.

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Filament is the humanist programming langauge I've been working on. Filament's focus is entirely on computational thinking and improving the way we use PLs, not on the implementation or performance. It is for thinking about problems, not producing software artifacts. It should be easy enough for children to use, but powerful enough for domain experts. Think of it as Mathematica for kids, scientists, and artists.

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This is part of my series on the humanist programming language I’m building called (currently) HL. Read the rest here.

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This is part of my series on the humanist programming language I’m building called (currently) HL. Read the rest here.

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For years I’ve had this idea of a programming language (really a programming system) designed not for building software, but for exploring ideas. If built, it would be a system where you can easily access data both locally and remotely, process the data in many different ways, and use built in tools to visualize the answers. The current way we code just isn’t very amenable to exploring and thinking (outside of an Emacs Lisp buffer).

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I'm rebuilding my HTML Canvas Deep Dive book so I need a way to compile various source files into a final thing. I'm not producing an executable but rather a directory full of generated HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and possibly some other stuff; but it's the same basic idea. I need to turn a collection of things into another collection of things. I need a build system. So which should I use?

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I had the great pleasure to meet lots of dedicated engineers, researchers, and scientists at the W3C Immersive Web Working Group face to face meeting this week. This is the team dedicated to creating standards for mixed reality so that we can all enjoy future interactive content from the web-browser of our choice.

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I’ve written many times about how programming is being held back by storing our code as ASCII text.  My efforts garnered a dim reception.  As strong as the arguments for other storage formats may be, text works extremely well with existing tools. Leaving text behind means leaving an entire ecosystem of practice and tooling, thus we are stuck in a local maxima. 

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If you haven’t heard, Azer Koculu unpublished a bunch of his modules as protest against behavior by the company that backs NPM. This crashed the NPM ecosystem with hundreds of popular project suddenly unable to build. Now there’s lots of talk about what to do. PGP signatures? Always pinning? Permacaching with IPFS?  I think Azer's goal was achieved. We are now actually talking about how brittle the system. The conversation is happening. This is good.

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A post about Arthur Whitney and kOS made the rounds a few days ago. It concerns a text editor Arthur made with four lines of K code, and a complete operating system he’s working on. These were all built in K, a vector oriented programming language derived from APL. This reminded me that I really need to look at APL after all of the language ranting I’ve done recently.

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I have a problem. Sometimes I get something into my head and it sticks there, taunting me, until I do something about it. Much like the stupid song stuck in your brain, you must play the song to be released from it's grasp. So it is with software.

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I need to move on to other projects so I’m wrapping up the rest of my ideas in this blog. Gotta get it outta my brainz first.

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Lately I've been digging into Rust, a new programming language sponsored by Mozilla. They recently rewrote their docs and announced a roadmap to 1.0 by the end of the year, so now is a good time to take a look at it. I went through the new Language Guide last night then wrote a small ray tracer to test it out.

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After the more abstract talk I’d like to come back to something concrete. Regular Expressions, or regex, are powerful but often inscrutable. Today let’s see how we could make them easier to use through typography and visualization without diminishing that power.

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So far my posts on Typographic Programming have covered font choices and formatting. Different ways of rendering the source code itself. I haven’t covered the spacing of the code yet, or more specifically: indentation. Or even more specifically: tabs vs spaces.

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So far my posts on Typographic Programming have covered font choices and formatting. Different ways of rendering the source code itself. I haven’t covered the spacing of the code yet, or more specifically: indentation. Or even more specifically: tabs vs spaces.

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Apparently my last post hit HackerNews and I didn’t know it. That’s what I get for not checking my server logs.

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