Andy Matuschak

Seminar on Engraft, a system for composable live programming; Oct 29 @ 9AM PDT

Added 2022-10-21 20:49:43 +0000 UTC

Join me and author Joshua Horowitz on Oct 29 from 9-10AM PDT to discuss Engraft, a new system for composable live programming from Joshua Horowitz (formerly of Dynamicland, now a PhD student at UofW). Please read the paper (or at least watch the video) and bring questions, concerns, noticings.

Please note that this paper is still in submission; do not share the link publicly.

We have computational notebooks; we have Visicalc-like live expression editors; we have noodle-based programming tools like Blueprint. But these tools generally exist in their own universes. If you want to combine them with traditional software programming methods, or with each other—using "the right" live programming tool for each job—you're in trouble.

Engraft is a very interesting attempt to make live programming environments compose well with each other and with traditional programming environments.

Though the authors situate their papers in different historical lineages, I feel Engraft makes an interesting pairing with last month's discussion of Webstrates. Both of these systems are interested in breaking software primitives into more composable, malleable, interoperable elements. Of course, they have different priorities, and they take different approaches—but I've enjoyed pondering them both as pieces of the same puzzle.

I hope to see you next Saturday, Oct 29! And, reminder: office hours this Monday (Oct 24) at 2PM PDT.