The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Natural Language Programming (News)

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

GPTScript is a new scripting language to automate your interactions with LLMs, Adam Wiggins conducts a retrospective on Muse, Nikita Prokopov surveyed a bunch of popular websites to see how much JS they loaded on their pages, Pages CMS is a no-hassle CMS for GitHub pages & Jim Nielsen writes about the subversive hyperlink.

What up nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, February 26, 2024. If my math is correct, which is rare, our good friend Gerhard Lazu officially turns four years old on Thursday. Happy leap year birthday, Gerhard. As an aside, one of my first ever programs for school calculated leap years. So I learned the hard way that it's more complicated than just is the year divisible by four. The actual logic is year mod four equals zero and and, open paren, year mod 100 not equals 0, or year mod 400 equals 0, close paren.

But I digress. Let's get into the news. GPT script is a new scripting language to automate your interactions with LLMs, which for now just means open AI. From the project's homepage, quote, the ultimate goal is to create a fully natural language-based programming experience. The syntax of GPT script is largely natural language, making it very easy to learn and use. Natural language prompts can be mixed with traditional scripts such as Bash and Python or even external HTTP service calls. End quote. The project includes examples of how to plan a vacation, edit a file, or run some SQL. The central concept is that of tools. Each tool performs a series of actions similar to a function, and GPT script composes the tools to accomplish tasks. Adam Wiggins writes a Muse retrospective. We went deep on Muse,

which is a Canvas-based thinking tool for iPad and Mac, during our two-part Heroku interview with Adam. So it's sad to see him move on from the project. Quote, we raised $2 million in funding, grew the team to seven, had tens of thousands of active users, and thousands of customers. Despite that, we never reached sufficient organic growth or found the right business model for financial viability. I stepped away along with the majority of the team in the fall of 2023, leaving the business in the hands of one of my former colleagues, end quote. With a laudable level of transparency, he lays out Muse in its entirety, from its origins and original vision to why it didn't work and his final takeaways, including these. One, inventing a new document type is hard.

Two, helping to define an emerging category is hard. And three, stuff that works eventually stops working. It's now time for Sponsored News. Instead of forcing it into the confines of traditional row and column structures, move beyond the limitations of relational databases for tasks they aren't built to handle. Whether it's managing intricate supply chains, detecting fraud, conducting real-time analytics, or powering Gen AI applications, graph technology excels in scenarios rich with interconnected data. Thank you. and EO4J.com slash developer. Check it out, and thanks once again to Neo4j for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Nikita Prokopov surveyed a bunch of popular websites to see how much JavaScript they loaded on their pages. The results bring out the parent in me. Your mother and I are not angry with you,

but we're disappointed. Here's a sampling of the offenders. Zoom, six megabytes. Verc a sampling of the offenders. Zoom, 6 megabytes. Vercel, 6 megabytes. Pinterest, 10 megabytes. GitLab, 13 megabytes. Google, 9 megabytes. Nikki approximates that 10 megs of minified JS expands to about 300,000 lines of code. And remember, quote, it's not just about download sizes. I welcome high-speed internet as much as the next guy, but code, JavaScript, is something that your browser has to parse, keep in memory, and execute. It's not free.

And these people talk about performance and battery life? Pages CMS is a no-hassle CMS for GitHub Pages with a sales pitch that sounds like the start of an infomercial. Quote, tired of juggling Git and YAML to update your Next.js, Astro, Hugo, or Nuxt website? Make it easy on you and your team. Get a user-friendly CMS running straight on top of GitHub. End quote. This does look pretty cool. I'm personally not tired of juggling Git and YAML. Okay, maybe YAML. But I do love how this tool might enable technical and non-technical team members to

collaborate on a 100% free static website. Check it out at pagescms.org. Jim hyphen Nielsen writes about what he calls the web's superpower, permissionless link sharing. Quote, to some, the hyperlink is dangerous and must be controlled. They want to control what you link to. They want to control how many links you can make. They want to monetize your links and give you no credit. And yet, we keep on linking. To whoever we want. Hello, Apple.

However many times we want. Hello, Meta. And with no expectation of return. Hello, Google slash OpenAI. End quote. I couldn't agree more. I've long said the most important element of the web is the humble A tag. Go forth and link to things, or in Jim's words, subvert the status quo, own a website, make and share links. That's the news for now,

but I'm pretty excited for our upcoming follow-up episode with Nathan Sobo about the ZED editor. I've been using Zed ever since they open sourced it a few weeks ago, and I have to say, it's the first editor that's kept my attention for this long since Sublime Text.

That episode will drop on Friday. I'll leave you with this quote from Grady Booch. The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple. Have a great week. Make good software. Share the changel a great week. Make good software.

Share the changelog with other makers of good software. And I'll talk to you again real soon.