I'm building a language for learning to program on smartphones. It's a stack-based language designed for interactive editing (since typing code on a smartphone is no fun).
It's in the very early stages at the moment.
Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
51–60 of 123 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#52https://treeline.io/
YC company run by Mike McNeil. Visual backend programming. Built off Node, Sails and Machine Spec. The latter is particularly interesting:
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#53I am. I am working on a new programming language designed for the next generations. The language re-imagines the role of the compiler from being a monolithic static blackbox that converts source to executable, into being an open dynamic system the manages the language syntax and compilation process, but leaves the final syntax and actual compilation to hot pluggable libraries. Why? To make the language dynamically up…
I read the links; your language looks interesting, but could you expand a bit on what makes it a new approach? User-programmable syntax is an old idea; for instance, it's been a core feature of Scheme for 30+ years.
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#54Microsoft have done some great and totally ignored work with embedding visual languages into game engines for kids - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/ http://welcome.projectspark.com/
Wrt to Code Lauren you may also be interested in http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/index.html - a HCI approach to tooling (the WhyLine is my favourite).
Dog hasn't released much info yet but it's an interesting concept - http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2502026 https://www.media.mit.edu/research/groups/social-computing
Program synthesis is really interesting area of research eg http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/
VPRI has already been mentioned but I'd like to highlight their work on Programming as Planning - http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2009001_prog_as.pdf
From the last FPW, there were a couple of projects that really stood out for me: http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/bayesdb/ http://2015.splashcon.org/event/fpw2015-an-end-user-programm...
Also not really a new language, but Sam Aarons work on Sonic Pi is pedagogically interesting - http://sonic-pi.net/
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#55I'm working on a new approach to programming that is in the direction of Bret Victor's Inventing on Prínciple (focusing on environment, all open source)
Because we're prelaunch(and working hard on getting it to all of you!) I can't talk about it much yet, but we're funded and looking to work with great people.
Email me at cammarata.nick@gmail.com if you're interested in this space, would love to hear ideas and talk more.
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people creating multimedia works use visual programming languages that have dataflow models. Some that are fairly mature projects: vvvv - https://vvvv.org/ Puredata - https://cycling74.com/products/max/ Max MSP - https://puredata.info/
Am I wrong to think about the "graphical" aspect of visual programming languages as another layer of abstraction? If this is the case, doesn't that take some power away from these users, in the sense that their capabilities are limited to the abstractions/interface given to them by the language's developers? Not exactly trying to question whether it's a good/bad thing (as I'm aware that for many creators this might b…
No, because every language has one specific set of abstractions and interfaces chosen by the language's developers. This is the same for textual and visual programming languages alike.
What might well be very hard is making a language where all abstractions and interfaces map to useful graphical representations; I imagine it's much, much easier to represent a JSON object graphically than it is to represent a piece of C code this way.
For instance, how would jumps look? Lines going from far-removed boxes, producing code that literally looks like spaghetti? Moreso, do you even want to graphically represent things like pointer arithmetic, will this be easier to work with? How do you represent variables, globals?
Maybe you would only represent course features such as data flow graphically, and hide finer grained details and code in "blocks" with labels and defined in- and outputs. You would still mostly write your code, but the graphical view might help you mentally model your program.
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#57http://urbit.org/docs/theory/whitepaper
Seconding Urbit since I'm a giant fanboy. It's not a new programming languages as much as new computer, internet, everything. And it's a lot of fun to play with - Hoon isn't nearly as difficult as it looks :)
As insane as a lot of it seems, most of it are just logical conclusions from a few base ideas: what would computers look like if you owned your own data, if it was all built on top of a purely functional VM backed by bignum binary trees, if you could replace all the mistakes made over the years (nonversioned file systems, untyped shells, manually serializing data structures)
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#58Looking at hardware trends on servers, in the next ten years I expect more pure functional programming on the CPU (implicitly concurrent, write-once data structures) and more data-parallel array operations being offloaded to GPUs. The CPU language of 2025 is probably something very much like Haskell with a cleaned-up base library, but I'm not sure what the GPU component will look like to the programmer.
It probably looks like APL. Data-oriented programming, with the only type being vectors/streams of data. Ideal parallelization to however many million CUDA cores just by distributing the workset into partitions.
Really, its how GLSL and other shader languages work already, just hidden behind C-like syntax and lies.
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#59For a meditation on which aspects of our text-based programming tools derive from merits of the medium versus historical accident, see: http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-programming-languag... —there's also a second part (linked to within) that describes an alternate, general purpose architecture for programming tools that lets us stay powerfully text-centric while moving away from operating on character sequences under the hood.
I wrote this non-traditional program editor: https://youtu.be/tztmgCcZaM4?t=1m32s
And a new kind of visual debugger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE
Re: Ask HN: Which people and groups are researching new approaches to programming?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people creating multimedia works use visual programming languages that have dataflow models. Some that are fairly mature projects: vvvv - https://vvvv.org/ Puredata - https://cycling74.com/products/max/ Max MSP - https://puredata.info/
Am I wrong to think about the "graphical" aspect of visual programming languages as another layer of abstraction? If this is the case, doesn't that take some power away from these users, in the sense that their capabilities are limited to the abstractions/interface given to them by the language's developers? Not exactly trying to question whether it's a good/bad thing (as I'm aware that for many creators this might b…
I have done some programming in these and they are definitely more suited to the applications that their creators had in mind.
I wouldn't want to do general purpose programming in them -- at least as they exist currently.