Show Notes
Before the time-travelling talks, the programmable rooms, the ladders and rocket launchers, we had the first real Bret Victor essay: Magic Ink. It set the stage for Bret's later explorations, breaking down the very idea of "software" into a few key pieces and interrogating them with his distinct focus, then clearly demoing a way we could all just do it better. All of Bret's works feel simultaneously like an anguished cry and a call to arms, and this essay is no exception. For the next episode, we're reading Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur, with a little bit of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind thrown in for good measure. Links Four Hundred of the most Chart-Topping Thoughts of All Time: Inventing On Principal Stop Drawing Dead Fish Drawing Dynamic Visualizations Dynamicland Paper Programs by JP Posma was inspired by Dynamicland. "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." from Halt and Catch Fire Charticulator is Microsoft Research's take on a _Drawing Dynamic Visualizations_-esq tool. Jimmy's Fender Jazz bass looks like this, but red, but like a decade older, but like $600 at the time. We could probably post parts of this episode as Boyfriend Roleplay on YouTube. Fitts's Law is but one thing we've learned about the industrial design aspect of building good software. The Witness is a game where communicating ideas through (essentially) graphic design is the whole entire point of the game. If you haven't played it, know that it comes highly recommended by plenty of folks in the community. A "red letter Bible" is a Bible in which the words spoken by Jesus are colored red, to make them easier to identify. Toph Tucker has a pretty cool personal website. It's rare to see these sorts of sites nowadays, and they're always made by adventuresome programmers, trendy design agencies, or their clients. In the Flash era, it felt like everyone had a website like this, for better and for worse. tldraw is a beautiful little browser-based drawing tool by Steve Ruiz. What few things it does, it does exceptionally well. John while Henry had had had had had had had had had been my preference. #devlog-together is the channel on our Future of Coding slack community where members post small, frequent updates about what they're working on. The (Not Boring) apps are arguably a counterpoint to Bret's theses about information apps and harmful interaction, where the interaction and graphic design are balanced against being maximally-informative, toward being silly and superfluous, to great effect. Did you know there's a hobby horse, but also a hobby horse? I didn't! There are a few examples of folks doing FoC work that, in Ivan's view, align well with the values Bret outlines in Magic Ink: Szymon Kaliski's projects for Ink & Switch, summarized in his Strange Loop talk, Programmable Ink. Mock Mechanics is an environment for building mechanisms by Felipe Reigosa. PANE by Josh Horowitz inverts the usual node-wire programming pattern by putting data in the nodes and data transformation in the wires. Robot Odyssey was a 1984 game for the Apple II (and some other, lesser systems) in which players would go inside various robots to reprogram them. Music featured in this episode: Wash Machine, from the unfinished 2014 album Sneaky Dances Shaun's Amaj Rebirth, created in November 2022 for a friend named — you guessed it — Shaun. Hey! Send us questions we can answer on the show. Like, "How do you keep bread warm?" Or, "What's so great about concatenative languages?" We'll answer them. Send them here: Jimmy Ivan Or just DM one of us in the FoC Slack. futureofcoding.org/episodes/060 Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputing See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
More from Feeling of Computing
This episode is about the paper Technical Dimensions of Feedback in Live Programming Systems by Josh Horowitz. [THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK] [SERIOUSLY, IF YOU WANT SOMETHING HERE, WRITE IT YOURSELF] [NO PROMISES. MAKE IT GOOD] It's a solid episode — that's my take. You should listen to it instead of reading about it. And then give us your take. Links $ Gang, I'm sorry this episode is months late. It was a real doozy! But also, the bonus episodes over on our Patreon have been getting wildly ambitious. I did an insanely edited 54-minute video about The Browser Company. We had William Taysom over to share a deep critical analysis of The Witness. Jimmy and I shared what we'd do with our lives if we weren't doing computer stuff. And most recently, we spilled the design tea on two recent projects we've been working on — Jimmy's Whiteboard visual programming system, and Tenfold from Ink & Switch. If you like the FoC podcast, you'll get so much more of it for $5/month at feelingoff.com. Audio Hijack — this is the program we use to record the podcast. It has "Canadian Juice", which is a joke only Lu will get, but Lu isn't going to read this. But you all know what "juice" is, right? It's what Andrew Blinn does better than anyone, and he IS reading this. He fucking better be. Am I narrowcasting? Jimmy mentioned Notes from the Underground. I haven't read it, so I can't add snark. Sorry. We're making backend changes! Stay tuned. The new website for this podcast will be feelingof.com. You should check out that website, cool stuff there, and they have a podcast. The Hest podcast, which Ivan has always self-hosted (so to speak), is, basically, 38 episodes of Ivan describing what he's devoting his life to, one episode about the combat loop of the video game Death Stranding, and one episode about getting smaller and smaller forever, but make it music and about Ivan's misspent youth. If you're reading this and you haven't listened to it, what the hell are you doing! You'll love it so much! PlayBook is the project that the Programmable Ink folks at Ink & Switch have been working on since January 2024. Ivan is one of those folks. I'm one of those Ivans. Specifically, this is "the show notes writing Ivan". Have you met? He writes the show notes. I commentate on his work. This… paper(!)… was originally presented as a talk at LIVE PROG — which is almost a FOUR FOUR — in 2024 as a talk called Definitions & Dimensions of Liveness. Jimmy and Lu and I were in the room! Maybe that's the last time we'll ever be in the room. (Did you listen to the free 2025 holiday spectacular?) You sat along the fire… you saw the light… you saw. You're Sigur Rós, you're so. Why am I crying? Inventing on Principle — do we need to link to this? If you're reading these show notes and you haven't watched this talk, email [email protected] and I'll give you a virtual hug because you're listening to our podcast without getting, like, any of the jokes? Observable — same snark as previous Projection Boxes — now this one, I hadn't heard of, but if you have heard of it reach out and tell me about it so that I can be in on our jokes. The Ostrogoths are not rats, but I'm ready for either of them to invade Alberta. (Aside for any Alberta-curious listeners: there's interesting political history / class warfare here) Quokka is an editor extension that gives you live evaluated values right in the context of your JS code. Seems super neat on paper, but Ivan didn't have much luck using it. (skill issue) Glamorous Toolkit is the shining example of a "moldable" development environment. PANE is an interesting node-wire programming environment by Josh Horowitz, which flips the usual format by making the nodes hold state and the wires represent transformations. Node? Wire? Junk? Pipe? Baby Died, one of the uncountably infinite classic bits from My Brother, My Brother, and Me. Sketch-n-Sketch is one of the all-time great bidirectional editing environments. There's
We've renamed the podcast and community — we are now the Feeling of Computing! Here are some thoughts about the motivation to rename and the choice of new name. It's a small change, but it feels meaningful and clarifying. The new name better fits what we've been doing all along, and sets us up for the next decade of this community. The new name reminded us of The Computer is a Feeling, a document (of some definition) by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan. Unlike our usual selections, which are crouton-dry and tiring, this one is basically a 1-pager, quick and fun — you should totally give it a glance and see what you make of it, before Jimmy and I tease it apart and lawyer over the many nuances. This piece makes us question what the computer means in our lives, and how that may have changed over time. Light on specifics and arguably steeped in nostalgic yearning, its series of declarative statements come out more like broadly probing questions. Is the computer feeling possessed only by those who remember the time before the internet? Are computers even required? What does feeling this feeling elicit one to do? We answer at least one of these questions. "But you can't trust them, they're podcasters," said everyone ever, "you've got to feel it for yourself." Links $ While these main Feeling of Computing episodes are, in a word, infrequent, the bonus episodes over on our Patreon — Feeling Off — arrive at a dependable regularity! Why, in the time since we recorded this here episode, we've released two (2) bonus episodes. The first was a unruly deep tangent Jimmy and I fell upon right smack in the middle of this very episode, and then excised out — That's Shakespeare — about code.org, whether the "everyone should learn to code" movement is actually about literacy, the backlash to this movement, and our personal feelings on it all. Then in December we shared our annual end-of-the-year spectacular with games, awards, music, spelling, men who are spiders, and our predictions about the near and distant future — All of the False Ones — free free free for download, no patronage required. The old name is cursed. The old name might have been inspired by Bret Victor's talk The Future of Programming, but the vibe of the community is probably closer to Inventing on Principle. The new name invites us to reflect on the way our tools make us feel. For instance, Kid Pix was a quirky, playful drawing program designed for younger users which had its heyday in the 1990s when Ivan was a younger user, and it gave him some pretty specific feelings at the time. (Also, in the time since recording this episode, Ivan dug up a Snow Leopard iMac from the sedimentary rock and installed KidPix Studio 4, and his 6 year-old daughter has been having a blast with it.) One Piece is a manga and anime that's pretty popular, but perhaps off-topic for our community. Did you know about our virtual meetups? Every month we have people showing off their work, and it's been fantastic to see the wild variety of creative programming projects built by members of our community. We share the details of upcoming meetups in the #announcements channel on our Slack, and publish them in this Luma calendar. You should come! The feeling is still present, in your time, as it was in ours You can build computers out of water, if you want Sim City 3000 was released in 1999, and gave Jimmy the computer feeling. (Ivan played Sim City 2000 back in 1997-ish, and got pretty good at typing the word "FUND", before learning that this didn't actually give you free money and instead gave you a bond.) When Ivan says "go to six or seven bookmarks", that's a reference to this appfrom 2024, not the mid 2025 meme. The two folks in our sphere — Folk Computer by Omar (et al), and FolkJS by Chris Shank and Orion Reed. Folk Computer is similar to Dynamicland, which Omar did some interesting work on. Back in 1997, Ivan taught himself to edit videos using Avid Cinema, a Mac-only video editing tool that
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 readabili
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.