Sketches from CDG
May 2, 2020CDG (later known as HARC) was a short-lived research organization, founded by Alan Kay, where I was privileged to work from 2014-2017. As part of Alex Warth’s team, my research was mostly focused on creating new kinds of programming interfaces.
The practical side of our research produced Ohm, a library and language for building parsers, interpreters, compilers, and more. Besides contributing to Ohm itself, I also created the Ohm editor/visualizer to give people a better way to understand and debug their grammars. I’m proud to say that Ohm was a minor success, yielding a couple of conference papers, and even becoming part of the CS curriculum at Loyola Marymount University.
Another more ambitious thread of our research asked: what if programming were more like sketching on a whiteboard? What would it feel like to build dynamic, visual models at the speed of conversation?
Unfortunately, our funding ran out before we could make much progress on that work. But I recently discovered a folder full of gifs and screenshots that I made around that time, and figured I’d post them here for posterity.
For more about CDG itself, check out Vi Hart’s wonderful post about the history of her research group and the CDG SF lab.
