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The Name |
April, 2025
Long ago, the community was named Future of Coding. I believe Steve Krouse, who started the community, picked the name partly as an homage to Bret Victor's talk The Future of Programming. This name reflected the original purpose of the community: to gather fans of Bret's work, to explore similarly inspiring possibilities for how we might program computers (hinted at by PARC, Sketchpad, etc), and share our own research explorations to that end.
Since then, as our membership has grown, our focus has widened. For instance, we now often talk about computers as a cultural force — who uses them, what they use them for, how that affects all people, how that can be changed for the better, and how it all impacts our work. We still mostly talk about programming, and that's a unifying theme, but our curiosities extend far beyond. And we're increasingly frustrated by the meta-culture of computing communities — and it's here that the name fails us most of all.
By invoking the future, the name implies that we have all the answers, or that we have a singular vision. This is a dominating framing used by startup entrepreneurs, especially the ones making developer tools. They use language like "this is the future of coding" when talking about their product. It's snake oil — empty, self-important hype. This is something we've worked hard to avoid in our group. Our vibe is more wide-eyed and curious, yearning rather than selling. But from the outside, many people see our name and imagine the opposite.
Put 10 computer programmers in a room and ask them what "coding" means, and you'll get more than 10 answers. What's worse: put 10 non-programmers in a room and ask them if they want to be part of a "coding" community. You'll probably get unanimous "no"s — even if all of those people spend much of their time using a computer to do important work, and have interesting perspectives on what could make the computer better. As a group, we've repeatedly expressed an interest in listening to these non-programmer voices, and incorporating them into our community. We want more members who are designers, artists, organizers, ethnographers, home cooks, dance choreographers — I'm pulling these from memory, but suffice it to say that we want to invite anyone who has interesting things to say about what the computer means to them to come join us in sharing this wild yearning for a better computer.
That's what this community is truly about. We all use computers, and we want those computers to be better for us. We want them to be better tools, to help us do our work, or to help us play, or to love each other, or to just be ourselves. We want them to not be used by oppressive governments and corporations to manipulate and abuse us, by advertisers to sell us garbage and reap our attention. We want more people to be able to program them, because programming is a form of literacy and liberation (and more). We want fewer people to need to program to adapt computers to suit their needs. We want computers to be better for our bodies. We yearn for all these things and more.
Of course, we also want this to be a space to share a little 600-line hypertext system we whipped up for fun over the weekend. It can be all of these things. That's what it means to be an inclusive space for people to talk about all ways of making computers better.
So how do we name this community? Let's go back to first principles.
It's a community — a place for people to gather. We're gathered here to talk about the computer.
- People
- Computers
Can we pick something that adequately captures both elements, doesn't suffer the weaknesses of our current name, and yet has a sense of continuity with that name? Yes.
Feeling. People have feelings. Computers don't. By invoking feeling, we're speaking to the human element of our work, the culture, the personal, the communal. We're speaking to design; computers are tools, and every tool is only useful insofar as it can be wielded by a person, and that tool will feel a certain way to use. Feeling feels humane, implying openness and a spirit of sharing and camaraderie.
Computing. Computers are the things we're using, but we don't want to be narrow about what we're using them for. We need a word that captures "doing things with computers", especially but not limited to programming. While computing has an older meaning rooted in calculation, the modern colloquial sense is broad enough to suit our need.
Thus: Feeling of Computing, a broadening of our original name, though with a hint of the classic "FoC" poking through.