Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
17. Bruno Latour’s paper “Visualization and Cognition” is relevant to understanding the emergence of of Science in the west, and what works and doesn’t work in programming languages, and in our sense-making institutions today
http://bruno-latour.fr/node/293
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
Ok, time for a break
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
18. The best purpose of language in general, and programming languages in particular is to expand the domain of thinkable thoughts
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
19. Excel is a purely functional reactive programming language and environment with a built in database.
It is far better than most languages and IDEs
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
20. The folks working on Visual Programming Languages, Low Code, or No Code, to try to make programming more accessible to people are… I dunno, focused on not the best goal..
Rather than make it easier to do what you can do with JS, better goal is to make a better excel.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
21. Eve started in the right direction: combine the database, a UI for human I/O, and a nice declarative language
showed lots of promise @ 1st
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0…
you could tell they went off the rails when the demo was how to build Flappy Bird.
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
10.7 Million Javascript developers
(most popular ” programming language”)
500-750 Million people use Excel
(actual most popular programming language + env)
Why? Excel lets you treat you thoughts as data.
Easy to get started, can ALWAYS upskill to solve harder problems
Conor White-Sullivan 𐃏 @Conaw 2019-12-15
23. Weaknesses of Excel
Really only works for quantitative thoughts
But there are all sorts of relationships between qualitative thoughts, and algorithms you can run on them
We need a programming language for meta-cognition, + db + io
ideas here