Collective digest — 2022

2022 wobbled it’s way through some version of normality, with a bit more energy than recent years, but there’s still a lot going wrong as well… Let’s jump into this 2022 digest of collective activity and reflect on our conversations over the past year.

Catalog

In 2022, we added 1 more work to our catalog, bringing the total to 26 items. There are 45 further suggestions waiting for curation.

The new addition to the catalog is:

• Crochet (Q)

It’s fairly clear now that the current catalog process is too heavyweight. I hope we can move to a lighter workflow in the future that feels more like editing a wiki.

Mastodon

Twitter’s descent rapidly escalated this year. Many community members moved to Mastodon. A collective Mastodon account now exists, so please do follow along there. The contributors section also lists Mastodon accounts for those that have them.

Matrix

Our Matrix room has continued to be the most active communication medium used by the community.

Here’s a summary of interesting conversation topics from our room in 2022:

• TypeCell, notebooks, CRDTs, Matrix rooms as data stores
• Audit logs, sandboxing
• Goals for 2022
• Long form communication medium, malleable wikis
• TUIs, SSH apps
• Catalog ported to TiddlyWiki and Glamorous Toolkit
• Data colonialism
• Division of labor
• Common Lisp history, standardising languages
• Static vs. dynamic type systems, formal verification
• Malleability for domain experts
• Block protocol, document models
• Plugin-style customisation, platform capabilities
• Social structures, obstacles, research funding
• Startups, afraid of open platforms
• Ledgers, homomorphic encryption
• Unified project, parsing / serialisation
• Kartik Agaram’s Teliva, Zettelkasten, sandboxing
• Web-based OS, trusted agent
• Wasm, JVM, interoperability, debugging, profiling
• Monocultures, privacy
• Programming systems
• Modular hardware
• Compile-time vs. run-time type checking
• Debugging, inspecting state
• Encapsulation, program reuse
• Metamuse, CRDTs
• Programming workflows, notebooks, Alex Bandukwala’s draft blog post
• Debugging optimised programs
• Incremental workflows, late binding
• Folk interfaces, end-user programming
• Unison language, collaboration, distributed programming
• Common Lisp, code browser, GUI toolkits
• Industry headwinds, simple but wrong answers
• File managers, removing files from the OS
• Projectional editing
• Subconscious, distributed data storage
• Interactive / REPL-driven workflows
• Annotations
• Languages, funding
• Future of Coding podcast, Richard P. Gabriel
• Jack Rusher’s Stop Writing Dead Programs talk
• Type systems, capabilities, effects
• Universality, interoperability
• Mastodon
• Webstrates
• Expression vs. stepping debuggers, term rewriting

There continues to be interest in adding a long form communication medium (such as a Discourse forum). I’m hopeful we’ll have some time to arrange this in the new year.

Looking ahead

I hope we’ll continue to have insightful conversations as a community. I know I’ve learned quite a few new things as part of our discussions, and I hope others have as well.

As always, please do contact us if there’s something you’d like to share with the collective.