It sounds also like a nightmare but it would be interesting as heck to me to have a bunch of folks ambiently co-working on code at the same time. Render all the open windows into some kind of 2d or 3d space, then show avatars viewpoints shifting across different files as they go.
Alternatively, it'd be interesting (albeit again difficult and confining too) to have 2 or 3 folks working on the same desktop. Get a 8k 85 inch TV, with a long desk in front of it, and set it up with multi-pointer-x or some such, and let everyone work on the same shared surface.
Good write-up. Hypothesis is one of the greatest damned tools on the net; I wish we saw this stuff getting traction & iterated on, saw it rising. It feels like it afforda so much more to us than anything else people have done.
This existed in the 90s! The Self programming language[0] took Smalltalk's existing visual approach and extended it to be a full visual environment with interactive animations and physical metaphors, giving you a literal "desktop" to work on. Later versions of Self also supported working on a single "world" over the network, where the other users' objects and "hands" (cursors) would be visible to you. Here's an official movie released by Sun Microsystems:
A multiplayer lisp or smalltalk vm can work beautifully for this. With adhoc support for chat and video call. But that would work only in a single project context.
> Alternatively, it'd be interesting (albeit again difficult and confining too) to have 2 or 3 folks working on the same desktop. Get a 8k 85 inch TV, with a long desk in front of it, and set it up with multi-pointer-x or some such, and let everyone work on the same shared surface.
Just a bit over a week ago I was pair coding with a coworker over a live share VS Code session for an hour or so when I suddenly realized that they must have been talking the whole time and I couldn't hear them (which turned out to be an audio issue on my end). We had apparently gone from "both of us talking and hearing fine while pair coding on the same set of files" to "I could speak but not hear him and only see his cursor and typing, and even then only if I was looking at the same place as him at the same time". Part of why we were actually able to be somewhat productive for the period of time since I had lost audio (maybe half an hour or so?) was that he was non-verbally communicating incredibly well just with his editing; I might be writing a line of code, and then suddenly I'd see that he paused what he was doing and highlighted some other line, and I'd look and say "Oh! Good catch, I forgot to take into account <something related to the line of code he highlighted".
I suspect that having something like a live share session that I was using but sitting everyone in the same room would honestly give the same or better results; I think you're on to something that this sort of social interaction in the same room could be incredibly interesting for everyone involved, but I'm not convinced that you need any sort of special virtual working space with avatars _or_ a giant monitor for everyone to be on at the same time. Honestly, thinking about this is already giving me some ideas for hackathon-type stuff where collaboration can be encouraged by having a team share exactly one copy of the repository to all work on at once rather than everyone going off in to their silos and working on separate components.
I've done hackathons by having everyone ssh (and by extension, vscode remote ssh) into a shared virtual machine. It's way faster than any version control.
I was thinking more ambient co-presence. Getting to see what parts of the code - at a glance - are active, see where folks are in the codebase.
If someone does want help, then heck yeah, the same shared code-environment should help co-coding too! But I think the leap, for me, is trying to imagine staying connected, rather than everyone being siloed; ambient co-presence puts it nicely.
Alternatively, it'd be interesting (albeit again difficult and confining too) to have 2 or 3 folks working on the same desktop. Get a 8k 85 inch TV, with a long desk in front of it, and set it up with multi-pointer-x or some such, and let everyone work on the same shared surface.
Good write-up. Hypothesis is one of the greatest damned tools on the net; I wish we saw this stuff getting traction & iterated on, saw it rising. It feels like it afforda so much more to us than anything else people have done.