9 ms·

Well said. You know, sometime soon I need to make a stand. My gut check was that this wasn't the hill I'm willing to die on.

TuringTest 5y ago
I didn't know of the existence of Subtext, and I've felt impressed by the core set of ideas behind it (even if at first I was underwhelmed when first looked at how it was licensed, sorry about that). I've seen recently many other converging to the same region of the design space, but your approach hits all the relevant points on what I would expect on a system for a next-generation style of computing. I have some ideas on my own on building a new style of computing environment that doesn't feel alien, and I've arrived to a lot of the same conclusions that you describe in the "Notable features" section. My approach is to focus the environment in content-editing first (i.e. making it feel like a "structured content editor" more than a IDE), and representing code primarily with a metaphor of content transformation over collections (think Google's OpenRefine or MS Power BI), rather than as processes running on an application. I have a core idea at the base of the structure for this system, which is to reify function applications as a named object in the environment, much like your idea of treating function results as collections of values accessible as raw data. This reified object, which I call a wit for memorability, acts very much like items in your Subtext, except that: * Each wit has a unique identifier (a 'label') which can be used to annotate data directly through direct manipulation, like giving a name to a cell in a spreadsheet. The user can build collections by applying the same tag to all the values in the collection, manually or supported by a PbE process. The wit represents the data structure containing all those values; but at the same time it may represent the process used to generate them. * There is no distinction among scalars and collections. I think this is the most unique feature of my system; you may apply a function to a wit (identified by its label), and it gets lazily applied to all its values, thus creating a new collection of transformed values. This is similar to named ranges in a spreadsheet, but it doesn't depend on a positional grid. And single values are treated the same as collections, so there's no need for loop constructs; the user can simply build templates with wits as variables, which then get applied to all their possible values in their input domain. (Microsoft has a similar feature with their research on FlashFill, which was posted here a few days ago[1]). * Wits may be used as identifiers of attributes, to extract content from records. That content may be previously stored values or computed on the fly from their formula and current inputs (just like in your "Subtext is both a PL and a DB" line). I.e. wits can represent relations among entities, not just code applied over data. This blurs the metaphors of function application and data structure, which I believe is a good thing for easy-to-use computational environments. * Since code is seen as data collections, you can build repeatable behaviors by changing the input on a sequence of transformations. For example, recorded recent user actions are not seen as a sequence of code steps, but a sequence of intermediate processed states of the transformed collection (with each step being itself represented by a wit, and thus accessible as data). I think you have a similar idea with your "functions seen as expanding to traces", but I envision using the intermediate steps as possible inputs to new functions (facilitating creation of pipes and recursion by demonstration). I've felt my ideas validated when seeing that you've created a system which has evolved to a very similar design space; your Feedback mechanism is a neat solution to the representation of interaction and user updates, for which I didn't have a concrete solution (other than the abstract idea of representing all state as updates on functional-reactive streams). Unfortunately my design process involves primarily paper prototypes and lots of concept notes; and also I don't get paid for it, so there's very little in a shareable form. Do you have a public discussion forum where these ideas can be discussed in the open? It would be good to share my detailed concepts and see how they apply to concrete use cases that you may have in mind for building your system. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28548165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28548165 "Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel"
- jonathanedwards 5y ago
  Interesting. Check out the futureofcoding.org slack. There are some workshops that take early stage ideas, like LIVE and PX. Keep working on your ideas and try to pull them together into a coherent explanation. I'd be happy to take a look and give you some feedback.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    Thanks! I'll do that.
- kragen 5y ago
  It sounds super interesting.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    Thanks! I guess I'll clean up my notes and post them on futureofcoding.org community through the share-your-work section, to explain all the details and possibilities. I took inspiration from this [1] classic article by Henry Lieberman, where tags are applied to elements of a composite as a way to edit its structure; and I combined it with the idea of a templating system to process or generate items in bulk (all templating systems do this, my idea is to abstract it into a generalized, always present interaction mechanism). [1] http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/23ProblemSolving.html http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/23ProblemSolving.html Making Programming Accessible to Visual Problem Solvers
    - kragen 5y ago
      Neat! I liked that book so much I bought it in paper form; also YWIMC. Lieberman's work in particular has always been inspirational. I think he sits down the hall from Jonathan, but I could be misremembering. This morning I was working on a problem that I was thinking would be ideal for a system like this: I was taking notes in prose about potential blowing agents for waterglass or other geopolymer foams—things that produce gas when the polymer is heated to its softening point. For example, chalk, ammonium chloride, sulfur, aluminum hydroxide, sal mirabilis, saltpeter, or carbon plus silica. Each of these blowing agents produces a certain number of moles of gas per mole of blowing agent, has a certain molar mass, a certain density, a certain cost, and a certain activation temperature, plus certain material-compatibility concerns—you can't disperse hydrated sal mirabilis in an aqueous solution, for example, or chalk in an acid solution, if you want them to be intact in the unblown geopolymer preform. These are "givens" that can be found in a literature search or, in some cases, a search on MercadoLibre. In the prose document, I would like to be able to tag the gas production per mole, molar mass, density, activation temperature, and material compatibility in such a way that I can render a table of the candidate materials in the document itself, and then sort it by gas production per mass, per volume, or per dollar, and filter it by activation temperature. Gas production per mass is calculated from molar mass and molar gas production; gas production per volume is calculated from gas production per mass and density, and similarly for gas production per dollar. Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of, or am I imagining wits very differently from what you really have in mind? I look forward to reading your notes! (I'm not in the Slack. I hate Slack. It's ransomware.) A step beyond would be to type the reaction equations into the prose document and calculate the gas production per mole from that, and use a database of atomic weights to calculate the molar mass from that as well. With a database of the formation entropies and enthalpies of the compounds, I could not only calculate how endothermic the decomposition is (or, rarely, exothermic) but plot an Ellingham diagram as well, which would be pretty useful as a double-check on the sanity of the reported activation temperatures from the littrachaw. Together with combinatorial search functionality, it might also enable me to anticipate problematic side reactions, or how the activation temperatures would shift if the foaming was carried out at 1 MPa. Some of the quantities I'm calculating on have units attached, such as temperature and density, and some have intervals of uncertainty, such as price, and it would be useful to have the computer track those things instead of the human. Confusing a Gibbs free energy in kJ/mol with kJ/kg can be a problem; similarly gas production per gram or per cubic centimeter. Some of Jonathan's work on Subtext has focused on variants of or alternatives to test-first programming; in spreadsheets people sometimes do test-first programming (for things like the equilibrium-temperature calculation I mentioned above, for example) and then delete the tests. In a context like the blowing-agent survey, being able to hide them instead would be better. Finally, ideally, I'd like to be able to transclude at least the givens and possibly the calculation results in other notes: "According to my notes in [0], aluminum hydroxide is stable at atmospheric pressure up to 220°, ..." perhaps eventually refactoring those inputs into a centralized database so that I don't have to remember which note has the boiling point of sulfur in it. The calculation part would be easy to do in Gnumeric or localc, but those handle the prose, units, and intervals very poorly at best; and they would be hopeless for the equation parsing part and, at best, clumsy for the database queries and Ellingham-diagram plotting.

TuringTest 5y ago

I didn't know of the existence of Subtext, and I've felt impressed by the core set of ideas behind it (even if at first I was underwhelmed when first looked at how it was licensed, sorry about that). I've seen recently many other converging to the same region of the design space, but your approach hits all the relevant points on what I would expect on a system for a next-generation style of computing. I have some ideas on my own on building a new style of computing environment that doesn't feel alien, and I've arrived to a lot of the same conclusions that you describe in the "Notable features" section. My approach is to focus the environment in content-editing first (i.e. making it feel like a "structured content editor" more than a IDE), and representing code primarily with a metaphor of content transformation over collections (think Google's OpenRefine or MS Power BI), rather than as processes running on an application. I have a core idea at the base of the structure for this system, which is to reify function applications as a named object in the environment, much like your idea of treating function results as collections of values accessible as raw data. This reified object, which I call a wit for memorability, acts very much like items in your Subtext, except that: * Each wit has a unique identifier (a 'label') which can be used to annotate data directly through direct manipulation, like giving a name to a cell in a spreadsheet. The user can build collections by applying the same tag to all the values in the collection, manually or supported by a PbE process. The wit represents the data structure containing all those values; but at the same time it may represent the process used to generate them. * There is no distinction among scalars and collections. I think this is the most unique feature of my system; you may apply a function to a wit (identified by its label), and it gets lazily applied to all its values, thus creating a new collection of transformed values. This is similar to named ranges in a spreadsheet, but it doesn't depend on a positional grid. And single values are treated the same as collections, so there's no need for loop constructs; the user can simply build templates with wits as variables, which then get applied to all their possible values in their input domain. (Microsoft has a similar feature with their research on FlashFill, which was posted here a few days ago[1]). * Wits may be used as identifiers of attributes, to extract content from records. That content may be previously stored values or computed on the fly from their formula and current inputs (just like in your "Subtext is both a PL and a DB" line). I.e. wits can represent relations among entities, not just code applied over data. This blurs the metaphors of function application and data structure, which I believe is a good thing for easy-to-use computational environments. * Since code is seen as data collections, you can build repeatable behaviors by changing the input on a sequence of transformations. For example, recorded recent user actions are not seen as a sequence of code steps, but a sequence of intermediate processed states of the transformed collection (with each step being itself represented by a wit, and thus accessible as data). I think you have a similar idea with your "functions seen as expanding to traces", but I envision using the intermediate steps as possible inputs to new functions (facilitating creation of pipes and recursion by demonstration). I've felt my ideas validated when seeing that you've created a system which has evolved to a very similar design space; your Feedback mechanism is a neat solution to the representation of interaction and user updates, for which I didn't have a concrete solution (other than the abstract idea of representing all state as updates on functional-reactive streams). Unfortunately my design process involves primarily paper prototypes and lots of concept notes; and also I don't get paid for it, so there's very little in a shareable form. Do you have a public discussion forum where these ideas can be discussed in the open? It would be good to share my detailed concepts and see how they apply to concrete use cases that you may have in mind for building your system. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28548165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28548165 "Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel"

jonathanedwards 5y ago
Interesting. Check out the futureofcoding.org slack. There are some workshops that take early stage ideas, like LIVE and PX. Keep working on your ideas and try to pull them together into a coherent explanation. I'd be happy to take a look and give you some feedback.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  Thanks! I'll do that.
kragen 5y ago
It sounds super interesting.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  Thanks! I guess I'll clean up my notes and post them on futureofcoding.org community through the share-your-work section, to explain all the details and possibilities. I took inspiration from this [1] classic article by Henry Lieberman, where tags are applied to elements of a composite as a way to edit its structure; and I combined it with the idea of a templating system to process or generate items in bulk (all templating systems do this, my idea is to abstract it into a generalized, always present interaction mechanism). [1] http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/23ProblemSolving.html http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/23ProblemSolving.html Making Programming Accessible to Visual Problem Solvers
  - kragen 5y ago
    Neat! I liked that book so much I bought it in paper form; also YWIMC. Lieberman's work in particular has always been inspirational. I think he sits down the hall from Jonathan, but I could be misremembering. This morning I was working on a problem that I was thinking would be ideal for a system like this: I was taking notes in prose about potential blowing agents for waterglass or other geopolymer foams—things that produce gas when the polymer is heated to its softening point. For example, chalk, ammonium chloride, sulfur, aluminum hydroxide, sal mirabilis, saltpeter, or carbon plus silica. Each of these blowing agents produces a certain number of moles of gas per mole of blowing agent, has a certain molar mass, a certain density, a certain cost, and a certain activation temperature, plus certain material-compatibility concerns—you can't disperse hydrated sal mirabilis in an aqueous solution, for example, or chalk in an acid solution, if you want them to be intact in the unblown geopolymer preform. These are "givens" that can be found in a literature search or, in some cases, a search on MercadoLibre. In the prose document, I would like to be able to tag the gas production per mole, molar mass, density, activation temperature, and material compatibility in such a way that I can render a table of the candidate materials in the document itself, and then sort it by gas production per mass, per volume, or per dollar, and filter it by activation temperature. Gas production per mass is calculated from molar mass and molar gas production; gas production per volume is calculated from gas production per mass and density, and similarly for gas production per dollar. Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of, or am I imagining wits very differently from what you really have in mind? I look forward to reading your notes! (I'm not in the Slack. I hate Slack. It's ransomware.) A step beyond would be to type the reaction equations into the prose document and calculate the gas production per mole from that, and use a database of atomic weights to calculate the molar mass from that as well. With a database of the formation entropies and enthalpies of the compounds, I could not only calculate how endothermic the decomposition is (or, rarely, exothermic) but plot an Ellingham diagram as well, which would be pretty useful as a double-check on the sanity of the reported activation temperatures from the littrachaw. Together with combinatorial search functionality, it might also enable me to anticipate problematic side reactions, or how the activation temperatures would shift if the foaming was carried out at 1 MPa. Some of the quantities I'm calculating on have units attached, such as temperature and density, and some have intervals of uncertainty, such as price, and it would be useful to have the computer track those things instead of the human. Confusing a Gibbs free energy in kJ/mol with kJ/kg can be a problem; similarly gas production per gram or per cubic centimeter. Some of Jonathan's work on Subtext has focused on variants of or alternatives to test-first programming; in spreadsheets people sometimes do test-first programming (for things like the equilibrium-temperature calculation I mentioned above, for example) and then delete the tests. In a context like the blowing-agent survey, being able to hide them instead would be better. Finally, ideally, I'd like to be able to transclude at least the givens and possibly the calculation results in other notes: "According to my notes in [0], aluminum hydroxide is stable at atmospheric pressure up to 220°, ..." perhaps eventually refactoring those inputs into a centralized database so that I don't have to remember which note has the boiling point of sulfur in it. The calculation part would be easy to do in Gnumeric or localc, but those handle the prose, units, and intervals very poorly at best; and they would be hopeless for the equation parsing part and, at best, clumsy for the database queries and Ellingham-diagram plotting.