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Dynamicland 2024

dynamicland.org

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Re: Dynamicland 2024

#111

Post by cbreynoldson »

For those criticizing, think of this updated website more from the lens of art, less pragmatics. The Doug Engelbart "Mother of All Demos" functioned in this way as well. Can you imagine scoffing at Engelbart in the same way? There are quite a few deep ideas in this presentation of Dynamicland, many of which are subtle and take some effort to find and appreciate, much like art.

Yes, it is intended to be useful to many one day, and they claim it "actually works" _now_, but if you read carefully (and you should!), they are trying very hard to maintain (and gradually grow) a beautiful little flame of a vision. PARC, on the other hand, had 10 years. Afterwards, industry ran with the ideas they wanted, and Alan Kay has been beating the "you missed the big ideas!" drum since. The Dynamicland group is trying to learn from this lesson of history.

Kudos to the group.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#112

Post by motohagiography »

what an important set of ideas. if I'm interpreting correctly it's an instance of a pattern language for organizing people aided by tech. the idea seems to have moved past the constraints of goal oriented methodologies and on to modular blocks of logic for coordination.

i wonder if a coarse analogy for it might include roberts rules in a related category of ideas, and then with some concepts from tech around versioning and then it's something else entirely, but they seem to approach some of the same coordination problems.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#113

Post by samatman »

bobajeff wrote: post #38
skadamat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the goal here isn't to replace traditional software engineering. It's to bring computing to spaces. Museums, classrooms, town halls, etc, which requires a different approach. The mental model I use is professional cooking in a kitchen vs home cooking. Different scale, tools, and approaches but some overlap in core ideas. A pro cook can criticize a home cook's workflow and tools, but the goals are different!

I think their goal is similar to what smalltalk's goal originally was: To allow for regular people to do complex things with a computer. Ultimately, it didn't succeed in that goal but I believe inventing the first spreadsheet software can be counted as achieving some success there. I admire this project and hope they can one day move beyond simply typing code on a sheet of paper to creating tools that actually make o…

Without Smalltalk, there would have been no HyperCard, and HyperCard definitely succeeded in that goal to a significant degree.

It's a pity there's never been a modern reboot with the right factors aligned to continue that work.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#114

Post by d--b »

bsimpson wrote: post #39

I had the good fortune of taking a field trip there in 2018. The video is a very good overview of the project. One interesting artifact of "the real world simulates itself" is version control. At Dynamicland, each version of a program is a sheet of paper (with a unique set of fiducials along the edges). If you want to edit a program, you grab a keyboard and point it at the program. A text editor comes up; you make yo…

Can you “pipe” the results of one paper onto one of the inputs of the next?

That’d be pretty funky.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#115

Post by bbor »

sigmonsays wrote: post #49
bsimpson wrote: post #44

For those unfamiliar, the founder is Bret Victor. He made a name for himself working on human interfaces at Apple in the Steve Jobs iPad era. In 2012, he gave a couple of influential talks: Inventing on Principle, and Stop Drawing Dead Fish. Bret's take on being a visionary/futurist is fascinating. He imagines the near-future world he wants to live in, prototypes enough of it to write a talk about, and gives the talk…

that approach seems so off... i'm curious how it's justified. like countless hundreds of quotes on execution vs ideas, here is one: "Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does." anyways, i'm gonna spend a little more time this evening to really dig in.

The question is, what do you want more: to live in a good world, or be rich?

As the ancients said:

  A wise man plants trees he won’t live to see fully grown, and a greedy man overfertilizes trees in a mad dash to get the tree purchased by a faceless investor before anyone notices it’s sick.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#116

Post by jf »

thatguymike wrote: post #87

I spent quite a lot of time at Dynamicland Oakland. It's great fun and the people are just wonderful. I think of Realtalk as adding another layer to programs, the Physical Layer. Program behavior can be determined and controlled by physical layout as well as code. It's not completely unlike a frontend/backend distinction, and in fact you could make a Realtalk simulator using a javascript canvas much more easily than…

> You can't take a Cat from one program and a Dog from another program and have the dog interact with the cat. This is obvious in software - that's why we design APIs - but it's frustrating when all your programs exist in the same space

I also thought this, but learned that what I needed was an Alan Kay style "change of perspective".

The key for me was understanding the "wish" and "claim" concepts in Realtalk. In your example above, you would need to separate your "Dog" program into two programs: One that was simply a program claiming "I am a dog" and another that would encode dog behavior, something like "I wish that a bark sound would play when a dog is near a house" - then you'd leave it up to Realtalk to make that happen. Adding "Cat" behavior would mean adding two new programs: one to claim "I am a cat" and another "I wish that a meow sound would play when a cat is near a house". To make the "Dog" and "Cat" interact, you'd add a program that said "I wish that a growl sound would play when a dog is near a cat" and so on.

Another example that might help is how I learned this myself: I made a set of playing cards. What I ended up with was 52 pieces of card stock, each one had a program that was simply "Claim that I am card X" - and then I made separate programs the give those cards meaning. For example a program to give the cards a style would be something like "I wish that card 1 will have the Ace of Spaces printed on it, etc" and another program would be something like "I wish that the sum of all face values of the cards on this line is printed next to the line"

It took me several days to internalize this, but once I did things started getting fun pretty quickly. For example, I was able to make a program to "clone" a real world image onto a playing card by having Realtalk take a picture of a rectangle and then always project that image onto a particular card when it was face up. Because the cards just made claims about their identities, this let me separate the designs on the cards from the rules as well as add "training mode" programs to help teach basics. And they were all decoupled!

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#117

Post by bbor »

bsimpson wrote: post #68
noahtarr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He imagines the near-future world he wants to live in, prototypes enough of it to write a talk about, and gives the talk with the hopes that someone in the audience will be inspired to make it a reality. What makes you think this?

I was in the audience for Stop Drawing Dead Fish and talked to him about his approach afterwards.

Every time I try to quit hacker news, I get pulled back in by threads like this one. Seriously, thanks for sharing your knowledge! Talk about a trump card in any argument, lol

Substantively: more people should do that. Especially the wildly-insanely-unimaginably rich ones.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#118

Post by jf »

d--b wrote: post #114
bsimpson wrote: post #39

I had the good fortune of taking a field trip there in 2018. The video is a very good overview of the project. One interesting artifact of "the real world simulates itself" is version control. At Dynamicland, each version of a program is a sheet of paper (with a unique set of fiducials along the edges). If you want to edit a program, you grab a keyboard and point it at the program. A text editor comes up; you make yo…

Can you “pipe” the results of one paper onto one of the inputs of the next? That’d be pretty funky.

Yes. Though not in the traditional way that we think of "pipe" working. A good example of this was the "zoom lens" in Omar Rizwan's Geokit: https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#119

Post by rtkwe »

sedatk wrote: post #78
shoxidizer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest instead convincing every printer manufacturer to embed in every printer a routine that encodes a unique identifier on every print and then reading that using more typical cameras. The hard part has already been done. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

Oh, that’s why my HP inkjet refuses to print a black & white page when it’s low on yellow.

Not entirely it also uses bits of color ink to make the black and white page look better, at least according to the printer companies who conveniently also benefit by selling you more ink.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#120

Post by justin66 »

Uehreka wrote: post #108
sorrythanks wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can look at some of the other replies in this thread to see how deeply this can be misunderstood. And I think the fear is more about losing the meaning of dynamicland. The source code isn't the idea, the idea is. That's what needs to be communicated. The web page is huge, though, with an unbelievable amount of information if you want to build your own. https://dynamicland.org/archive/2023/Front_shelf

So like, if they want me to reverse engineer Dynamicland and make my own, fine. But I’m WAY more likely to misunderstand what it’s about through reverse engineering it than I would be if I had actual source code I could study. I’m sure there’s some truly revelatory stuff in the architecture of RealTalk OS, and a reimplementation would be missing all that. If what they want is for people to try and reimplement Dynamic…

> But I’m WAY more likely to misunderstand what it’s about through reverse engineering it than I would be if I had actual source code I could study.

What a low opinion you have of yourself. On the contrary, you're likely to learn a lot more (and of course, spend orders of magnitude more time) recreating something interesting from the ground up than you are simply copying the source code.

The source code isn't the interesting part.

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