Alan’s blog

Dynamic scoping/binding of variables has a bad name, rather like GOTO and other remnants of the Bad Old Days before Structured Programming saved us all¹.  But there are times when dynamic binding is useful and looking around it is very common in web scripting languages, event propagation, meta-level programming, and document styles.

So is it really so bad?

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1. Strangely also the days when major advances in substance seemed to be more important than minor advances in nomenclature [back]

Over a cup of tea in bed I was pondering the future of business data processing and also general programming. Many problems of power-computing like web programming or complex algorithmics, and also end-user programming seem to stem from assumptions embedded in the heart of what we consider a programming language, many of which effectively date from the days of punch cards.

Often the most innovative programming/scripting environments, Smalltalk, Hypercard, Mathematica, humble spreadsheets, even (for those with very long memories) Filetab, have broken these assumptions, as have whole classes of ‘non-standard’ declarative languages.  More recently Yahoo! Pipes and Scratch have re-introduced more graphical and lego-block style programming to end-users (albeit in the case of Pipes slightly techie ones).

Yahoo! Pipes (from Wikipedia article)	Scratch programming using blocks

What would programming be like if it were more incremental, more focused on live data, less focused on the language and more on the development environment?

Two things have particularly brought this to mind.

First was the bootcamp team I organised at the Winter School on Interactive Technologies in Bangalore¹.  At the bootcamp we were considering “content development through the keyhole”, inspired by a working group at the Mobile Design Dialog conference last April in Cambridge.  The core issue was how one could enable near-end-use development in emerging markets where the dominant, or only, available computation is the mobile phone.  The bootcamp designs focused on more media content development, but one the things we briefly discussed was full code development on a mobile screen (not so impossible, after all home computers used to be 40×25 chars!), and where literate programming might offer some solutions, not for its original aim of producing code readable by others², but instead to allow very succinct code that is readable by the author.

if ( << input invalid >> )
    << error handling code >>
else
    << update data >>

(example of simple literate programming)

The second is that I was doing a series of spreadsheets to produce some Fitts’ Law related modelling.  I could have written the code in Java and run it to produce outputs, but the spreadsheets were more immediate, allowed me to get the answers I needed when I needed them, and didn’t separate the code from the outputs (there were few inputs just a number of variable parameters).  However, complex spreadsheets get unmanageable quickly, notably because the only way to abstract is to drop into the level of complex spreadsheet formulae (not the most readable code!) or VB scripting.  But when I have made spreadsheets that embody calculations, why can’t I ‘abstract’ them rather than writing fresh code?

I have entitled this blog ‘part 1′ as there is more to discuss  than I can manage in one entry!  However, I will return, and focus on each of the above in turn, but in particular questioning some of those assumptions embodied in current programming languages:

(a) code comes before data

(b) you need all the code in place before you can run it

(c) abstraction is about black boxes

(d) the programming language and environment are separate

In my PPIG keynote last September I noted how programming as an activity has changed, become more dynamic, more incremental, but probably also less disciplined.  Through discussions with friends, I am also aware of some of the architectural and efficiency problems of web programming due to the opacity of code, and long standing worries about the dominance of limited models of objects³

So what would programming be like if it supported these practices, but in ways that used the power of the computer itself to help address some of the problems that arise when these practices address issues of substantial complexity?

And can we allow end-users to more easily move seamlessly from filling in a spreadsheet, to more complex scripting?

1. The winter school was part of the UK-India Network on Interactive Technologies for the End-User.  See also my blog “From Anzere in the Alps to the Taj Bangelore in two weeks“ [back]
2. such as Knuth‘s “TeX: the program” book consisting of the full source code for TeX presented using Knuth’s original literate programming system WEB. [back]
3. I have often referred to object-oriented programming as ‘western individualism embodied in code’. [back]

Just at MobiKUI in Fribourg.  I did tutorial this morning and just had talk by Roope Takala about cool things happening at Nokia.  Dominique Guinard now talking about kinetic user interfaces.  My first time in Switzerland too and looking forward to fondue this evening.

I’ve just been at a two-day workshop on “Tags and Tagging” organised by the “Branded Meeting Places” project.

Tags are of course becoming ubiquitous in the digital world: Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks; at the digital/physical boundary: RFID and barcodes; and in the physical world: supermarket price stickers, luggage labels and images of Paddington Bear or wartime evacuees each with a brown paper label round their necks. Indeed we started off the day being given just such brown paper tags to design labels for ourselves.

As well as being labels so we know each other, they were also used as digital identifiers using a mobile-phone-based image-recognition system, which has been used in a number of projects by the project team at Edinburgh (see some student projects here). We could photograph each others tags with our own phones, MMS the picture to a special phone number, then a few moments later an SMS message would arrive with the other person’s profile.

Being focused on a single topic and even single word ‘tag’ soon everything begins to be seen through the lens of “tagging”, so that when we left the building and saw a traffic warden at work outside the building, instantly the thought came “tagging the car”!

The workshop covered loads of ground and included the design and then construction of a real application – part of the project’s methodology of research through design. However, two things that I want to write about. The first is the way the workshop made me think about the ontology or maybe semiology of tags and tagging, and the second is a particular tag (or maybe label, notice?) … on a toilet door … yes the good old British scatological obsession.

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A couple of weeks ago I attended a mobile design workshop at microsoft labs in Cambridge. Great 2 days … people from academia and industry (and no not just MS, also Google, Yahoo, Sony, Nokia, …!)

Most of the time was spent splitting into small working groups then coming back together for plenaries. I took part in groups discussing:

(1) tools to make it easier for those in developing countries to design mobile phone applications that suit their needs [session notes], rather than simply passing on applications and designs fitted for very different needs and infrastructure. During the discussion various applications of phone technology were cited that were completely different form those we would expect in the UK, US or Europe, but fitted the situations of people. These included using the address book as a ‘who owes what’ list for a trader … the ‘telephone numbers’ were in act amounts of money! This use of ‘ancillary’ parts of the phone rather than simply being a glorified communication device. Although he context of this was Africa, it also echoes studies of domestic phone use by Malay women in the UK by Fariza (who has just had her PhD viva ). She found alarm, calculator and things like that, at least as important as phone & text for the people she studied.

(2) ‘mindfulness’ and mobile phones … and of course the fact that normally they do the opposite interupting etc. … but just to not make us all agree too much, I said that mindfulness sounded like we should all become like rabbits; it is the looking forward and back, with all its stress, that is one of the things that make us human.

(3) task/data oriented interaction … escaping from the ‘application’. This was particularly relevant to me given onCue at aQtive was in this space as are Snip!t and work on TIM project with colleagues at Rome, Athens and recently new collaborators Madrid … with whom I had a short but lovely visit after CHI.