Over the past year and a half, I've been collaborating with Dark (a new programming language startup) to research programming languages and tools. Today we are sharing these reviews publicly.
The Whole Earth Catalog was before my time, but I grew up immersed in many of the conversations it began. This series borrows its name, and continues in its tradition of "access to tools". Stewart Brand’s original inspiration for the Catalog was helping his "friends who were starting their own civilization hither and yon in the sticks." This series is likewise designed to help visionary friends, but where his friends were living off-the-grid, my friends are creating the programming environments of the future. This series is democratizing access to tools one-step removed. These reviews are for the makers of tools, those that are pushing our computational interfaces forward. The goal of the Whole Code Catalog is to provide inspiration for the tools you will one day create.
Other similar efforts to catalog futuristic computational interfaces include:
- Ivan Reese's Visual Programming Codex
- Chaim Gingold's Gadget Survey
- Katherine Ye's collection of links on notation
- Eric Hosick's Visual Programming Languages - Snapsnots
- Jonathan Edward's Gallery of Programmer Interfaces
- Daniel Garcia's Mind Bicycles
If you enjoy this catalog, you may also enjoy the Future of Coding Slack Community and Future of Coding podcast.
Thanks to the Dark team for their support and partnership. Thanks to Ivan Reese, Jonathan Edwards, Aidan Cuniffee, Nicolae Rusan, Geoffrey Litt, and Matt Marcus for their feedback.