Poll link right at the end
Amen Zwa, Esquire pinged me in his thread about computer science pedagogy when Paul Sutton asked him if there was fediversal-programming-teaching (in particular at school levels relating to Amen’s writing, but one can be young-at-heart forever surely).
First, I pointed out that the electronic music community is practically electric with both learning and teaching, i.e. sharing knowledge of their art. This spun off into an example of itself, with discussion of midi interfaces being used in live performances, and cl-supercollider.
Next, I noticed that Mousebot’s Mastodonel + Eduardo’s eev emacs modes work together to turn mastodon toots into interactive computer programs.
EDIT: Quick note, eev lets you mix and match who gets what lines, so whatever mixture of languages you like and have installed can be imagined in place of my common lisp.
A mastodon client (such as mastodonel) normally shows you recent toots that have a first degree connection to you (this is the there-is-no-algorithm algorithm). When you select one, it is expected to show you a single threaded message history up to the message=toot you selected, and then every possible thread continuation after the point you selected.
One subjective advantage is that skills used for socializing are literally the skill used in growing and replying=forking/customizing computer programs; and you could reply=fork at a point other people have replied=forked the program/mastodon-thread in your own new exploration.
Eev-mode is something like a broad-spectrum automation and configuration tool. It helps people very quickly set themselves up in repeatable ways, understand and investigate/cross-reference what is happening, and interactively send lines of code to interactive programs like a lisp repl at the press of a button. So if the mastodon thread contains the code, eev sends the code in the mastodon thread to the interpreter it is meant for.
;;;; #tooteev #commonLisp sharpsign experimental toot
coding
• (setq inferior-lisp-program "ecl")
• (setq eepitch-buffer-name "*slime-repl ECL*")
• (slime)
(princ 'o/)
screwlisp (@screwlisp) 2025-10-23 14:17:47 via mastodon.el
―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 0 🔁 | 1 💬
⬇
(1+ 1)
(- *)
screwlisp (@screwlisp) 2025-10-23 14:19:07
―――――――――――― 0 ⭐ | 0 🔁 | 1 💬
⬇
#|
happily, the reply-depth bar doesn't interfere with eev's
just-mash-F8 useage. However non-coding lines I need to
skip (down-arrow or C-n instead of F8).
• (slime)
(princ 'o/)
screwlisp (@screwlisp) 2025-10-23 14:17:47 via mastodon.el
―――――――――――― 0 ⭐ | 0 🔁 | 1 💬
⬇
(1+ 1)
(- *)
screwlisp
or in the repl;
; SLIME 2.29.1
CL-USER> (princ 'o/)
O/
O/
CL-USER> (1+ 1)
2
CL-USER> (- *)
-2
CL-USER>
|#
screwlisp (@screwlisp) 2025-10-23 14:26:18
―――――――――――― 0 ⭐ | 0 🔁 | 0 💬
where #| this is a block comment in lisp |#, relating to the emacs screenshot earlier. You could use other tools, or write client or web applications that do this for a host language straightforwardly.
I guess two important wants are
“now do just that here”
and
"now do a subsequence of another thread starting here and stopping there.
I guess that an otherwise empty Mastodon quote post will be understood as
Just do the quoted post for this post
and a quote post with another link in its body means
Starting at the quoted post, evaluate until the other linked toot
inclusively. Note that I just picked this; Mastodon quoting toots is new, so this is super off-the-cuff.
I suggest reading and following the music discussion that happened when I mentioned the fediversal music community: https://post.lurk.org/@emenel/115420588503276600
I do not believe I already know the implications of this theory of writing programs and sharing program structure with others, though as we can see, the possibility is easily realised as it stands with the Mastodonel emacs major mode and eev emacs minor mode.
Diluting social content with coding content I do not expect to be a problem; tags and words can be blacklisted and unblacklisted in the mastodon to screen out content you do not want in the first place, and otherwise many people are both interested in social community and programming in the first place.
So I will try doing my programming-blocks as mastodon threads; then there is the question as to whether my blog posts show just-the-repls-output, or a transcript of the mastodonel rendering of the mastodon thread being evaluated.
Two more ideas; I was meant to treat with the author of orgsocial at some point, but we lost contact in that month where I lost track of lots of intended guests. Another idea is that Doug Merritt has occasionally told me he had encouraged John Allen to update The Anatomy Of Lisp for common lisp (it is written in Maclisp). I guess it would be fun to directly adapt the book chapters and exercises to be Mastodon threads, or something like that.
The poll link “good/bad-idea-p” with a request for comments: https://gamerplus.org/@screwlisp/115419759865602527