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Subtext: uncovering the simplicity of programming

News:

9/20/23 Live & Local Schema Change: Challenge Problems. To appear at LIVE'23

2/15/23 Technical Dimensions of Programming Systems. Received the Editors' Choice award. Tomas made a nifty website!

11/1/22 Interaction vs. Abstraction: Managed Copy and Paste. To appear at PAINT'22. [recorded demo]

10/19/21 Returning to the beginning: Typed Image-based Programming with Structure Editing at HATRA'21. [blog post] [paper] [recorded talk].

12/9/20 Here lies Subtext 10, which tried to solve the Update Problem. I'm publishing it mostly to share the design rationale. The most theoretically interesting bit may be Feedback.

4/28/20 Subtext 9 has fallen between the cracks, and all it gets is this lousy blog post.

8/29/18 Postscipt to PPIG talk: Managed Copy & Paste

6/14/18 PPIG'18 video submission: Direct Programming

10/3/17 LIVE'17 video submission: Reifying Programming

1/1/16 Subtext tried to hide inside Chorus

12/1/14 Subtext 5 video from Future Programming Workshop: Two-way Dataflow

9/11/13 Screencast on types in Subtext 5: type as subtext

8/21/13 First public demo of Subtext 5 at the IFIP Working Group 2.16 on programming language design.

What is Subtext?

Subtext is an ongoing experiment in radically simplified programming. It is radical in that I am willing to throw away everything we know about programming and start from scratch. This approach antagonizes both academics and professionals, but it is what I must do.

I am focusing first on application programming, i.e. websites and mobile apps and desktop apps. Roughly speaking the goal is to combine the full power of an app framework like Rails or Android with the simplicity and usability of a spreadsheet. Subtext is not a Domain Specific Language but rather a general purpose language designed from the ground up to make application programming radically simpler and easier.

The history of Subtext

Social matters