Just the programmer

Last week I’ve read some good things I want to share with you.

#The big demo

Bret Victor tweeted this interactive summary of Douglas Engelbert’s demo in 1968. It’s also called “the mother of all demos” and introduced a lot of things we take for granted nowadays.

📺 35 minutes with Douglas Engelbert: 1968 Demo Interactive

#Taming the meta language

This is the title of Cheng Lou’s talk, which he gave at ReactConf '17. It’s about pulling more things, which are communicated around a programming language inside the language itself.

It reminds me of the things I like about Elm. It pulls types, immutability and effects as data into the language, which makes a lot of meta communication via comments, documentation or education unnecessary.

The link is Alex Kotliarskyi’s post about this talk with some examples.

📃 Alex Kotliarskyi’s post: Understanding “Taming the meta language”

#A tool for thinking in systems

Nicky Case is known for his insightful, interactive web applications/presentations.

This time he released an application, which allows you to create and simulate a system by drawing circles and arrows. Try to remember this tool, if you need to understand a complex system better.

🎮 Play with: Loopy: a tool for thinking in systems

#Goodbye Programming in the 21st century

James Hague’s blog is one of the few I’ve subscribed to. Unfortunately he won’t publish any new content on it.

Thanks to the collection of his favourite articles I’ve found the one below from 2016 about being “Just the Programmer”. It lists some things to watch out for, if you don’t want to be the implementer of someone else’s vision.

📃 James Hague on: Being more than “Just the programmer”