The Onward! Essays 2024 submission deadline of April 25 is rapidly approaching.

If you have an essay relating to software, programming, or programming languages which has not yet been formally published please consider submitting it.

2024.splashcon.org/track/splash-2…

Call for Onward! Essays
Submissions due 25 Apr 2024
2024.splashcon.org/track/splash-2…

Onward! is more radical, more visionary and more open than other conferences. Onward! Essays invites software developers&academics to submit essays on the state & possible futures of software development

To: the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the ones who see things differently

Subject: you should write an Onward! paper

alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1708

Another post in my series on architecture as a metaphor for software development. Inspired by staring at the ceiling in Centre Pompidou after NewCrafts tomasp.net/blog/2023/pomp…

BrendanEich Bob Cook Frosty The full (189 page) HOPL JavaScript history paper is at dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.114…
NOT paywalled!

wow, found an official guide from Apple on how to structure your GUI app to support chat commands using LLMs with function calling 🤯

imagine saying to chatgpt 'set that chart to be a 3d pie' and that command can get routed to a Part of your Compound Document

Ecma TC53 workshop in Cupertino, on 6 Dec 2023

'...participants will discuss proposals and consider options for embedded JavaScript standardization including new APIs, interoperability, packaging, and Hardened JavaScript (aka Secure ECMAScript)'

ecma-international.org/news/invitatio…

The 2023 edition of the ECMAScript (JavaScript) standards have been released and again this year we used pagedjs to produce PDFs from HTML.

Paged.js 0.4.1 was more robust than 0.3.5 that we used last year. ❤️❤️

The PDFs are at
ecma-international.org/wp-content/upl…
ecma-international.org/wp-content/upl…

LIVE Programming Workshop 2022 videos are up
youtube.com/playlist?list=…

Demanding facts from a neural net is the wrong way around. If you want facts, ask a search engine/constraint solver/encyclopedia.

We taught machines to intuit. That's a big deal.

i want 'end user programming' because even as a professional developer of 15 years, it's still nearly impossible for me to make a useful app or tool to think with in a couple of hours. anything remotely interesting takes 10-100+ hours

Yup, the reason better development technologies never resolves the 'software development crisis' is because our ambitions always expand until they exceed our capabilities.

In fact, most early (1950s-60s) languages only had non-reentrant subroutines with statically allocated vars. Through the 70s there was controversy WRT desirability of implicitly or explicitly allowing procs to be reentrant/recursive.

Few understand this: 'JavaScript is an extraordinarily good language. ... they think it's a toy language, but in fact, it's probably one of the best languages out there. The other thing is, it's had billions of dollars of investment to make it very, very, very fast' - David A Smith

Happy to serve as this year's SPLASH Conference Onward! papers PC chair! Please see the CFP here: 2023.splashcon.org/track/splash-2… Submission deadline: 28th of April! Send your crazy and visionary ideas to Onward! #onward23 #splash23

🧵Biden has released his 'National Cybersecurity Strategy'. It's just police-state thuggery designed to kill innovation on the Internet. It says it wants innovation -- but only on their terms, with the jackboot of police-state oppression on your neck.
whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…

Typecels can cope and seethe, but OOP is and remains the best technology for many domains, especially ones with complex, hierarchical, dynamic structures like GUIs.

In my experience it feels magical to build software in a local-first style when the tools work well and are fast. You just write client software, no servers, you can collaborate live with people.

A nice overview of some patterns to support this:

inkandswitch.com/pushpin/

Automerge 2.0 is here! Orders of magnitude faster, vastly better memory use, a compact binary format, a built-in synchronization engine, and available in both Rust and JavaScript. Best of all? Thanks to sponsors, Alex Good works full-time on improving it. automerge.org/blog/automerge…

Jens Eckels Eclipse Foundation Our read is that the European Cyber Resiliency Act as currently drafted will legally turn open source foundations into suppliers, with the same legal obligations as companies. The unintended consequences of that are exhausting to consider.
eclipse-foundation.blog/2023/01/15/eur…