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The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

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Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

#11
I love Bret Victor and believe he has some very important things to say about design (UI design, language design and general design) but a lot of his concepts don't scale or abstract as well as he seems to be implying (ironic because he has a full essay on "The Ladder of Abstraction" [0]).

He makes some keen observations about how tooling in certain areas (especially front end design) is geared towards programmers rather than visual GUI tools, and tries to relate that back to a more general point about getting intuition for code, but I think this is only really applicable when there is a visual metaphor for the concept that there is an intuition to be gotten about.

To that end, rather than "programming not having progressed", a better realisation of his goals would be better documentation, interactive explainers, more tooling for editing/developing/profiling for whatever use case you need it for and not, as he would be implying, that all languages are naively missing out on the obvious future of all programming (which I don't think is an unfair inference from the featured video where he's presenting all programming like it's still the 1970s).

He does put his money where his mouth is, creating interactive essays and explainers that put his preaching into practice [1] which again are very good for those specific concepts but don't abstract to all education.

Similarly he has Dynamicland [2] which aims to be an educational hacker space type place to explore other means of programming, input etc. It's a _fascinating_ experiment and there are plenty of interesting takeaways, but it still doesn't convince me that the concepts he's espousing are the future of programming. A much better way to teach kids how computers work and how to instruct them? Sure. Am I going to be writing apps using bits of paper in 2050? Probably not.

An interesting point of comparison would be the Ken Iverson "notation as a tool of thought" which also tries to tackle the notion of programming being cumbersome and unintuitive, but comes at it very much from the mathematical, problem solving angle rather than the visual design angle. [3]

[0] https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

[1] https://worrydream.com/KillMath/

[2] https://dynamicland.org/

[3] https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

#13
post #11

I love Bret Victor and believe he has some very important things to say about design (UI design, language design and general design) but a lot of his concepts don't scale or abstract as well as he seems to be implying (ironic because he has a full essay on "The Ladder of Abstraction" [0]). He makes some keen observations about how tooling in certain areas (especially front end design) is geared towards programmers ra…

Ideas that scale don't scale until they do. The Macintosh didn't come out until people had been using WIMP GUIs for 10 years. People tried to build flying machines for centuries before the Wright Brothers figured out how to control one.

Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

#14
I was greatly inspired by his work. After getting enough skills, I even built my own IDE with live coding and time traveling. Its practical use is questionable, and it seems like nobody is really interested in such tools.

Playground: https://anykey111.github.io

Images: https://github.com/anykey111/xehw

Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

#16
post #9

The future we have yet to achieve as we kept ourselves too busy doing UNIX clones. While the ecosystem got a few good ideas for software development, even the authors eventually moved on to creating other OS and programming languages designs, some of which closer to those ideas like Inferno and Limbo, or ACME in Plan 9.

Seems to me the big failure was sticking with the Von Neuman architecture. Perhaps that was a forcing function towards where we’ve ended up.

Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

#17
post #9

The future we have yet to achieve as we kept ourselves too busy doing UNIX clones. While the ecosystem got a few good ideas for software development, even the authors eventually moved on to creating other OS and programming languages designs, some of which closer to those ideas like Inferno and Limbo, or ACME in Plan 9.

Seems to me the big failure was sticking with the Von Neuman architecture. Perhaps that was a forcing function towards where we’ve ended up.

The big failure is that we stick with languages designed for computers and not people.

A C (or Rust) kernel is a heroic effort that takes man-years to complete. A Lisp one is an end of semester project that everyone builds for their make belief machine (also implemented in Lisp).

Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

#18
post #3

This part is interesting with regarding to LLMs: https://youtu.be/8pTEmbeENF4?t=817 . He presents as if it were the year 1973, pokes fun at APIs (think HTTP), then says that computers in the future will figure out by themselves how to talk to each other. The opposite had become true when the presentation was actually done, but now the situation is turning.

I wonder what LLMs say about us when they talk to each other.

"They're made out of meat" maybe. https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

#19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me the big failure was sticking with the Von Neuman architecture. Perhaps that was a forcing function towards where we’ve ended up.

The big failure is that we stick with languages designed for computers and not people. A C (or Rust) kernel is a heroic effort that takes man-years to complete. A Lisp one is an end of semester project that everyone builds for their make belief machine (also implemented in Lisp).

How is Lisp performance these days? It was around in the 70’s, right? So I guess the overhead couldn’t be too bad!

Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

#20
post #3

This part is interesting with regarding to LLMs: https://youtu.be/8pTEmbeENF4?t=817 . He presents as if it were the year 1973, pokes fun at APIs (think HTTP), then says that computers in the future will figure out by themselves how to talk to each other. The opposite had become true when the presentation was actually done, but now the situation is turning.

I wonder what LLMs say about us when they talk to each other. "They're made out of meat" maybe. https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

> "what LLMs say about us when they talk to each other"

That's like asking what does a kaleidoscope paint on its day off.

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