Alarming Development

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Dispatches from the User Liberation Front

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Last post: Dec 11, 2025
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Dec 11, 2025 · original
Tomas Petricek and I submitted a paper to the Programming Journal : Baseline: Operation-Based Evolution and Versioning of Data arXiv , Playable demo . We got good feedback from one reviewer but the other two were unsympathetic. We’ve been asked to make “major revisions”, which are mostly the usual demands for more “evidence” and “evaluation”. I’m not sure if we will revise or submit elsewhere. For those interested in how this game works I’ve attached the reviews below. Review #15A Overall merit 1. Accept Reviewer expertise 4. Expert Paper summary This paper introduces Baseline, which is presented as a calculus for operation-based changes to data (for versioning purposes), but is also available as an interactive tool. Baseline supports records and lists, and is extended to include references to express relational database-like data structures (though the Baseline data model is more genera
Subtext Retrospective
Sep 29, 2025 · original
Looking back and forward .
Substrates vision statement
May 12, 2025 · original
Submitted to Substrates-25 Workshop Jonathan Edwards May 12, 2025 What is a substrate? I define a Substrate as: A complete and self-sufficient programming system, with a persistent code & data store, providing a direct-manipulation UI on that state. Supports live programming. Programming & using are on a spectrum, not distinct. Conceptually unified — not a “stack”. Summarized as a slogan: a WYSIWYG document, DB, & PL in one. The canonical examples of a substrate are Smalltalk and LISP systems. HyperCard and Flash were much-beloved beginner-friendly substrates. Spreadsheets are by far the most successful substrate, and an inspiring existence proof that alternative programming experiences are possible. Webstrates construct a substrate in the web browser, though with a different definition : “We define shareable dynamic media as collections of information substrates (or substrates for short
DB usability: as if
Mar 1, 2025 · original
My talk at HYTRADBOI
Podcast interview
Feb 12, 2025 · original
Schema Evolution in Interactive Programming Systems
Dec 10, 2024 · original
New paper Many improvements to programming have come from shortening feedback loops, for example with Integrated Development Environments, Unit Testing, Live Programming, and Distributed Version Control. A barrier to feedback that deserves greater attention is Schema Evolution. When requirements on the shape of data change then existing data must be migrated into the new shape, and existing code must be modified to suit. Currently these adaptations are often performed manually, or with ad hoc scripts. Manual schema evolution not only delays feedback but since it occurs outside the purview of version control tools it also interrupts collaboration. Schema evolution has long been studied in databases. We observe that the problem also occurs in non-database contexts that have been less studied. We present a suite of challenge problems exemplifying this range of contexts, including traditiona
Video: Operational Version Control
Nov 3, 2024 · original
LIVE 2024 keynote talk
Oct 22, 2024 · original
Operational Version Control
Mar 11, 2024 · original
Abstract of a talk I just gave: It would be useful to have version control like git but for data structures, particularly the data structures we call spreadsheets, databases, and ASTs. Operational Version Control observes changes to typed data structures by recording high-level operations performed in a GUI or API. These operations can change both values and types, with type changes inducing corresponding value changes (so-called schema migration). Version control capabilities such as differencing, merging, and reverting are constructed out of transformations on operation histories. This theory requires as input a set of rules formalizing the intuitive sense that two operations “do the same thing” in different states. Our prototype implementation presents the user a simplified conceptual model: branches with linear append-only histories, forking by copying branches, and cherry-picking as
Experiment visualizing structure diffs
Feb 24, 2024 · original
Related work: Diffing and patching tabular data

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