Follow our journey in building a language and the future of advanced technology training

HyperCard was a piece of software bundled for free with original Macs in the late 80s and into the 90s. It’s probably my favourite piece of software, but very hard to define. It was all of: a database, a rapid application development framework, and a hypertext system — you know, like the web. It was probably the first widely available hypertext system, in fact.

tl;dr: Pandita is ready for alpha testers! If you’re excited by the possibility of better technology for teaching and everyone, then add your name to our alpha tester list.

UNESCO has published a report on the use of digital technology, worldwide. As a builder of digital technology for education, there is a lot I agree with.

Justin Searls’ article about The Demise of the 10x Developer is great. Honestly, that’s partly because I feel very seen. But also, because this generation gap feels real.

A few years ago I was on a work trip in New York. For ‘team bonding’ we went to a commercial-style kitchen to cook dinner for ourselves, with the help of professional chefs. It was actually a lot of fun; I’d recommend it.

Are surveys good evidence? In some cases, it may seem like there is no choice: how else are you going to find out if people say they prefer Coke or Pepsi other than asking them? Even then there are still two issues.

There are a few guiding principles behind the design of Indu. Keep the language small with only a few constructs is one. Encourage building programs by assembling small pieces into larger is another.

“Content marketing is telling jokes where every punchline is exactly the same.” Have you heard that too? Sounds like good advice, right? It’s pretty focused.

But would you want to go to a stand-up gig like that?

I’m deeply disappointed with modern technology. The smartest minds of my generation have spent two decades inventing surfaces for somewhere to strap ads. A product is successful if it gives a 5.3% increase in conversions.

This is not the future I was promised.

Assignment is interesting. It’s one of the few places where the syntax tree does map well to the execution, but you can’t get to where you want to go through re-writing syntactic sugar.

I started blogging in 2007. I think this makes me a second-wave blogger. I’ve built up a decent library of posts over on my personal site. And I’ve moved that site, and all it’s posts, across three platforms and two domains. But, it’s never been my job, just something I’ve occasionally enjoyed. This is borne out by my very sporadic posting.

It’s been a few months, and, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem lay-offs are over. The big companies with huge lay-offs make the news, but it’s happening to medium and small companies too. Being laid off sucks.

The Indu virtual machine has three phases: a parser that produces an abstract syntax tree, a compiler that takes the AST and produces byte-code, and a virtual machine that executes that byte-code.

We’ve all taken surveys. There’s one right here on this page. But, are we all aware of how much modern knowledge is derived (through statistics, usually) from answers to surveys? How accurate and reliable is that knowledge?

For Pandita, I’ve started writing a virtual machine implementation of the core language, Indu. I’ve been working on this for a few years now. I’ve made a bit of progress, and I’m now going to try to write about what I’ve learned, and future progress.

If you’re going to use some new method to teach, you should want some evidence that this method works. But what makes evidence? Even harder, what makes good evidence?

Something I’m enjoying!

Oddly Influenced, a podcast about how people have applied ideas from outside of software to software.

Much writing about learning and teaching focuses on teaching skills to novices. I’m thinking a lot about teaching experts. Who is writing and talking about that?

Previously, there were quite a few limitations on the expressions that could be used to initialise an attribute in an object. None of these limitations were mentioned in the overview, but they existed nonetheless.

Indu uses an English-like syntax with very little use of symbols, unlike many other programming languages. This is intentional, but also quite controversial amongst professional programmers. I believe that using a natural language-like syntax will make Indu easier to learn, and so more available to people.

Programming languages, like real languages, are big, sprawling things. You can’t expect to design a big, sprawling thing right. Instead, a language will adapt as it’s used; new features will be added as people need them; existing features will adjust; old features will need to be removed. This video is a masterpiece. A perfect illustration of how a language should change over time.