There are many perspectives you could take on the purpose of programming, from “building systems” to “modeling the world”, but none has further reaching consequences than “to augment humans.” With computers so ubiquitous that they live in our pockets, what can we do to help realize the vision of programming for everyone? To even begin answering that, we have to dig into what “augmenting humans” really means and see how that perspective leads us to somewhere very different than our current programming systems. To find a path forward, we’ll have to look at domains that seem far from ours, but doing so might just give us a hint at what the future could look like.

Chris grew up as part of the Nintendo generation, having learned the parts of a computer at the age of two and later learning numbers and colors from a Sesame Street game on the NES. He started programming at the age of ten and took his first paid development gig at 17. Since then he’s built websites large and small, written frameworks and libraries used by thousands, taught developers around the world, and helped envision the future of development at Microsoft. These days, he’s the co-founder and CEO of Kodowa, where they built the next generation code editor Light Table and now Eve, a new vision for putting computation in the hands of everyone.