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Not much has changed since 2012 when this was published, Rust & Go (released in 2009/10) still don’t have any GUI libraries anywhere near as simple as REBOL, instead wrapping an older GUI system or using XML. In fact, most programming languages seem to expect you to make the GUI in HTML/JavaScript/CSS now, 6 years after this post. Even visual programming languages like Scratch rely on replicating textual elements with graphical puzzle pieces. Once you get into Piet or pureData, the language is visual, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to write a GUI app with an esolang like Piet, pureData, on the other hand, lets you create a simple or more complex GUI but it’s nothing you would traditionally consider code.
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Haven’t seen it before – looks good – and it’s been ported to Rust/Go & Javascript… https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
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I think that the we are still far away from the ideal library the article mentioned.
Electron (for all it’s flaws) get’s fairly close. It’s not as descriptive, but HTML paired with a good CSS framework can get fairly close.
There’s nothing that’s true native that comes even close though. I wonder how long it’ll take. Maybe with the advent of UIKit for macOS/iOS we’ll get another paradigm shift?
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This has a lot of overlap with ideas I’ve been working on independently (like small computing, composable GUIs, implicit over-the-network message passing on cluster computers, and stack based languages with visible state). Presumably Don & I have both been paying a lot of attention to Alan Kay :). Glad there are fellow-travelers around – for a long time it was easy to believe I was the only Xanadu/Smalltalk/ZUI guy around!
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I really like the “tentative guidelines for composable uis” post. Going to save and reflect on that a bit.
I’ve been working on a live-codeable interactive environment inspired by Self/Smalltalk etc., but using a Lua prototype-inherited scopes system (where code is “eval’d” in reified environments that can inherit from each other). After some iteration on such things I’ve realized it helps to have a concrete use case (allows testing, motivation, and empathizable communication with other people), but at the same time the choice of good use cases is important: if I choose a “make boring CRUD apps” use case, it basically involves porting existing libs + concepts and limits experimentation – so I went with a ‘generative art tool’ use case. This seems to let folks that look at it challenge their current ways of thinking about “software development.” It can evolve from static to animated art, then simulations (thus allowing games) and eventually hoping for network collaboration etc. Here are some videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDGzEUJscYE (making an art sketch)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-mxbhHBFOw (making another sketch)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRMeOGc1JLQ (slightly older, using it on the phone, you can see the browsing / inheritance here)
As you may have noticed, here too there is a concept of ‘sending messages’ to the scopes – all a message is is some code to eval at the scope, and that’s how you program objects to begin with anyways.
Some of the ‘composable UI’ stuff I’ve explored here is that like the
.__tostring(...)metatable function Lua datatypes can support, the ‘console’ window will call a.__toui(...)metatable function on values you try to print in it (if defined), so that objects can provide their own renderers, you can set custom renderers for slots that you add to scopes (going to explore this soon for color picker widgets), …I’m trying to use terminology like ‘perform’ etc. and more other art/human oriented words to move this tool away from “software engineering as a career choice” style orientation, as I think some of your blog posts also touch on. ‘Mindstorms’ by Seymour Papert along with some other readings are fun to explore here…
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This is fantastic!
Some of my earlier experiments in the composable-UI vein used Lua, but I found that it was easy to run up against both coroutine problems (lack of preemption) & limitations in the maximum number of identifiers in the global namespace. Your work here looks a lot more advanced than mine ever got.
(My current prototype is in Io, but I discovered that I would essentially need to rewrite Io to get a working system, because it stopped being maintained years ago & has problems with its speculative execution based thread planning.)
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Yeah def. understand the global identifiers thing – in my prototype above globals are by default written to the ‘current object’ and scopes can inherit, so it sort of works like process environments in UNIX. You can really bend Lua to your will a lot – I do it by setting the metatable of the environment that code is eval’d in.
Thanks for the nice words. :) I really like your writings so will be digging in there more. Definitely feels like you’ve thought about this stuff a lot and there’s good overlap. Will update you as I make more progress on this. Let me know if / when you have any more sources for me to grok!
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There’s a group of people interested in the subject of composable UIs, hypertext, and utopian attempts to fix what’s broken about computing as a whole, over on mastodon. Most of my discussion happens there, & a lot of what I write on Medium is a refined version of discussions I have there. You might find that stimulating – I don’t represent the views of the whole community, which overlaps with the generative art scene.
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(My current prototype is in Io, but I discovered that I would essentially need to rewrite Io to get a working system, because it stopped being maintained years ago & has problems with its speculative execution based thread planning.)
I didn’t realize Io wasn’t maintained anymore! That makes me sad. By happenstance, I’d looked recently and found the repo itself to be quite active, but it does mostly look like keep-it-going maintenance, not heavy work. Ah well. I recall it having its own pretty cool UI toolkit back in the day, too.
That said, would you mind explaining a bit about the speculative thread planning? I was just an undergrad last I used it, and I’d thought Io had a pretty normal cooperative threading system; this makes it sound like I really misunderstood something pretty cool, but I can’t find much (any?) info about this on the language site. (All I could find was the note, “The Scheduler object is responsible for resuming coroutines that are yielding. The current scheduling system uses a simple first-in-first-out policy with no priorities.”)
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There’s some kind of complicated heuristic for determining whether or not coroutines have already exited, when determining whether or not to transfer control to them. I ran into false positives with regard to that behavior, which were not entirely reproducible. I asked about the behavior in the irc channel, & was told that this was a known bug with the scheduler system, and one of the reasons active development was halted – the author didn’t think he could get the behavior right in C, if I understand the history correctly.
I started implementing a new version in Go (a language I don’t know, but one that has support for channels and real multithreading built-in). This should allow me to more easily make it support a smalltalk-style image-based format with a history & support for transactions & rolling back execution, too, so it’s a general win. (Plus, since I don’t need to keep full compatibility with Io, I can break that compatibility if it makes it easier to make my composable UI system – the important bits are message passing, multi-threading, a prototype-based object system, and a simple syntax with few keywords to memorize, all of which can be preserved.)
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Hell yes on composable components! Great articles, thanks!
Here’s the money shot from an HN article I just posted about that:
Valerie Landau interviewed by Martin Wasserman
Q: Do you have any last minute comments or observations about him to finish up. Or a good anecdote?
A: I think – I wanted to say one thing that Doug told me many years ago. And this is really for the software developers out there. Once, this was in the 90’s. And I said, Doug, Doug, I’m just started to get involved with software development, and we have this really cool tool we’re working on. Do you have any advice, about … for a young software developer. He looked at me and said:
“Yes. Make sure that whatever you do is very modular. Make everything as module as possible. Because you know that some of your ideas are going to endure, and some are not. The problem is you don’t know which one will, and which one won’t. So you want to be able to separate the pieces so that those pieces can carry on and move forward.”
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Working on a graphics live-coding Smalltalk/Self-inspired system that’s been tested so far on macOS, Windows, iOS (iPhone + iPad) but should work on Linux and Android too: https://youtu.be/rRMeOGc1JLQ Working on tablets is a main goal to allow for live drawing and fun educational applications.
Has all of love2d.org and uses ImGui for UI. Uses a multiple-prototype-inheritance-oriented object system I made in Lua where the global scope of code you write is itself the object’s members with inheritance. “methods” have ‘call next method’ in the topological sort of the ancestor DAG. The main primitive involves “send”ing a scope code to eval. The hope is for it to make sense to do network sends.
It’s in basic stages; hoping to work on error handling this week (idea: the send primitive itself notifies an error method on the object and inspectors can show logs) and try making a demo generative art painting app.
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nikki
4 months ago
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Nice! I’ve been hacking on a Smalltalky (more Selfy tbh) system in Lua + LOVE — https://youtu.be/rRMeOGc1JLQ. Will be fun to dig into yours. Is there capability for actual textual scripting or only visual?
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As a junior developer doing my best to learn as much as I can, both technically and in terms of engineering maturity, I’d love to hear what some of the veterans here have found useful in their own careers for getting the most out of their jobs, projects, and time.
Anything from specific techniques as in this post to general mindset and approach would be most welcome.
Several essentials have made a disproportionate benefit on my career. In no order:
These have had an immense effect on my abilities. They’ve helped me navigate away from burnout and cultivated a strong intrinsic motivation that has lasted over ten years.
Thank you for these suggestions!
Would you mind expanding on the ‘be political’ point? Do you mean to be involved in the ‘organizational politics’ where you work? Or in terms of advocating for your own advancement, ensuring that you properly get credit for what you work on, etc?
Being political is all about everything that happens outside the editor. Working with people, “managing up”, figuring out the “real requirements’, those are all political.
Being political is always ensuring you do one-on-ones, because employees who do them are more likely to get higher raises. It’s understanding that marketing is often reality, and you are your only marketing department.
This doesn’t mean put anyone else down, but be your best you, and make sure decision makers know it.
Basically, politics means having visibility in the company and making sure you’re managing your reputation and image.
A few more random bits:
Can you give an example? So many days I sit down after work or before in front of my computer. I want to do something, but my mind is like, “What should I program right now?”
As you can probably guess nothing gets programmed. Sigh. I’m hopeless.
Having a plan before you sit down is crucial. If you sit and putter, you’ll not actually improve, you’ll do what’s easy.
I love courses and books. I also love picking a topic to research and writing about it.
Some of my favorite courses:
I’ve actually started SICP and even bought the hard copy a couple weeks ago. I’ve read the first chapter and started the problems. I’m on 1.11 at the moment. I also started the Stanford 193P course as something a bit easier and “fun” to keep variety.
One thing that I’ve applied in my career is that saying, “never be the smartest person in the room.” When things get too easy/routine, I try to switch roles. I’ve been lucky enough to work at a small company that grew very big, so I had the opportunity to work on a variety of things; backend services, desktop clients, mobile clients, embedded libraries. I was very scared every time I asked, because I felt like I was in over my head. I guess change is always a bit scary. But every time, it put some fun back into my job, and I learned a lot from working with people with entirely different skill sets and expertise.
I don’t have much experience either but to me the best choice that I felt in the last year was stop worrying about how good a programmer I was and focus on how to enjoy life.
We have one life don’t let anxieties come into play, even if you intellectually think working more should help you.
This isn’t exactly what you’re asking for, but, something to consider. Someone who knows how to code reasonably well and something else are more valuable than someone who just codes. You become less interchangeable, and therefore less replaceable. There’s tons of work that people who purely code don’t want to do, but find very valuable. For me, that’s documentation. I got my current job because people love having docs, but hate writing docs. I’ve never found myself without multiple options every time I’ve ever looked for work. I know someone else who did this, but it was “be fluent In Japanese.” Japanese companies love people who are bilingual with English. It made his resume stand out.
Your greatest skill in my eyes is how you interact with people online as a community lead. You have a great style for it. Docs are certainly important, too. I’d have guessed they hired you for the first set of skills rather than docs, though. So, that’s a surprise for me. Did you use one to pivot into the other or what?
Thanks. It’s been a long road; I used to be a pretty major asshole to be honest.
My job description is 100% docs. The community stuff is just a thing I do. It’s not a part of my deliverables at all. I’ve just been commenting on the internet for a very long time; I had a five digit slashdot ID, etc etc. Writing comments on tech-oriented forums is just a part of who I am at this point.
Wow. Double unexpected. Thanks for the details. :)
Four things:
People will remember you for your big projects (whether successful or not) as well as tiny projects that scratch an itch. Make room for the tiny fixes that are bothering everyone; the resulting lift in mood will energize the whole team. I once had a very senior engineer tell me my entire business trip to Paris was worth it because I made a one-line git fix to a CI system that was bothering the team out there. A cron job I wrote in an afternoon at an internship ended up dwarfing my ‘real’ project in terms of usefulness to the company and won me extra contract work after the internship ended.
Pay attention to the people who are effective at ‘leaving their work at work.’ The people best able to handle the persistent, creeping stress of knowledge work are the ones who transform as soon as the workday is done. It’s helpful to see this in person, especially seeing a deeply frustrated person stand up and cheerfully go “okay! That’ll have to wait for tomorrow.” Trust that your subconscious will take care of any lingering hard problems, and learn to be okay leaving a work in progress to enjoy yourself.
Having a variety of backgrounds is extremely useful for an engineering team. I studied electrical engineering in college and the resulting knowledge of probability and signal processing helped me in environments where the rest of the team had a more traditional CS background. This applies to backgrounds in fields outside engineering as well: art, history, literature, etc will give you different perspectives and abilities that you can use to your advantage. I once saw a presentation about using art critique principles to guide your code reviews. Inspiration can come from anywhere; the more viewpoints you have in your toolbelt the better.
Learn about the concept of the ‘asshole filter’ (safe for work). In a nutshell, if you give people who violate your boundaries special treatment (e.g. a coworker who texts you on your vacation to fix a noncritical problem gets their problem fixed) then you are training people to violate your boundaries. You need to make sure that people who do things ‘the right way’ (in this case, waiting for when you get back or finding someone else to fix it) get priority, so that over time people you train people to respect you and your boundaries.
The methodology from that talk is here: http://codecrit.com/methodology.html
I would change “If the code doesn’t work, we shouldn’t be reviewing it”. There is a place for code review of not-done work, of the form “this is the direction I’m starting to go in…what do you think”. This can save a lot of wasted effort.
The biggest mistake I see junior (and senior) developers make is key mashing. Slow down, understand a problem, untangle the dependent systems, and don’t just guess at what the problem is. Read the code, understand it. Read the code of the underlying systems that you’re interacting with, and understand it. Only then, make an attempt at fixing the bug.
Stabs in the dark are easy. They may even work around problems. But clean, correct, and easy to understand fixes require understanding.
Another thing that helps is the willingness to dig into something you’re obsessed with even if it is deemed not super important by everyone around you. eg. if you find a library / language / project you find fun and seem to get obsessed with, that’s great, keep going at it and don’t let the existential “should i be here” or other “is everyone around me doing this too / recommending this” questions slow you down. You’ll probably get on some interesting adventures.
Never pass up a chance to be social with your team/other coworkers. Those relationships you build can benefit you as much as your work output.
(This doesn’t mean you compromise your values in any way, of course. But the social element is vitally important!)