The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
81–90 of 105 posts
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#82In case, like me, you didn't know who Bret Victor is, "...Victor worked as a human interface inventor at Apple Inc. from 2007 until 2011." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor
He was already inspirational before that; check out Magic Ink. Because Apple won't let him share his work for that period, he isn't known for it; it's sort of like a gap in the geological record.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#83Bret Victor speaks so idealistically it's difficult to disagree with his vision, but in reality he's a radicalized, scrappy cult leader. His ideas sound super cool but they're impractical - that's why nobody can make them work. We're delusional for worshiping him. https://christophlocher.com/notes/ethnographic-research-on-d...
A cult is usually what it takes to turn impractical ideas into practical ones. This link is great, thanks!
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#84Call me grumpy and sleep deprived, but every year I look at this talk again, and every year I wonder... "now, what" ? What am I supposed to do, as a programmer, to change this sad state of things ? Start the n-th "visual" or "image based" programming language (hoping to at least, make _different_ mistakes than the ones that doomed smalltalk and all other 'assemble boxes to make a program' things ?) Start an OS, hopin…
You could start a new project or contribute to an existing one. You could try out other people's projects and write about what you learned. You could write about what you learned from your own projects. You could give a talk that starts with a killer demo. You could try to find work that improves the situation, however slightly, instead of worsening it. You could sharpen your skills so that when you have more spare time you can make faster progress.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#85I 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
There was recently an HN post with a video of someone using a pretty cool environment that supported that kind of live-coding for creating an electronic music track -- it seemed very appropriate there, and I would guess likely to be popular.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#86The non-linear code structure (including visually) is something I've been thinking about for a long time and arrived at very naturally. I'm the "spread all the papers on the table to take in every interaction all at once" type of person, and so often I imagined a code editor that would allow me to just "cut" a piece of code and move it to the side. Separating stuff into files is kinda this, but it's not visual and ju…
yea i tried to do this (somewhat successfully) with a custom editor for css https://github.com/feralsoft/charisma (demos on my old x https://x.com/charisma_css ) css is primed for this since you can write your rules in such a way that rule order doesn't matter, which means you really don't have to think about where your code it in my dream world, i have very smart search (probably llms will help), i look at just the…
> i don't care where or how the code is stored, let the editor figure it out and just give me really good search and debuggers
I care, because I don't want any vendor lock-in. "The unreasonable effectiveness of plain text" hasn't gone anywhere.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#87Probably my favourite tech talk of all time. I did at least read the actor model paper! (though the 1973 one doesn't say much, you want the one with Baker, "Laws for Communicating Sequential Processes". I still don't know what he means about not liking APIs though. "Communicating with Aliens", what insight am I missing?
When two humans want to talk but don't speak a shared language, if they spend enough time together, they will figure out how to communicate eventually. But when two computers want to talk to each other and don't speak a "shared language" (aka, the client specifically must conform to the server's "language"—it's very one-sided in that sense) then no amount of time will allow them to learn one another's rules or settle…
I got that far but... what is the technical solution?
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#88Bret Victor speaks so idealistically it's difficult to disagree with his vision, but in reality he's a radicalized, scrappy cult leader. His ideas sound super cool but they're impractical - that's why nobody can make them work. We're delusional for worshiping him. https://christophlocher.com/notes/ethnographic-research-on-d...
wow i was really primed to hate this article and this take because i, for lack of better terminology, genuinely view Bret Victor as an idol of mine. but i guess that is the thing with idolatry… to be clear to anyone who doesn’t care to read the article (understandable): there’s nothing untoward or unseemly, just a research group that is clearly lost, and Bret as BFDL not being able to “save” it. i will say that the other researchers come off as being pretty soft and useless, but that obviously does reflect back on the group’s raison d’etre and thus, by extension, its leader. like, imagine being recruited to a research group by Bret fucking Victor and being like “nah, i don’t want to work on anything useful, and if i can’t do exactly what i want to do, i quit”. i say this all, despite appearances, with the utmost respect for all those principals, who i have stalked on github, X, etc. to an unreasonable degree out of a pure, assuredly naïve desire to get more bits from people who i consider to be doing the so-called “Lord’s Work”… the people they brought on absolutely are legit enough to have earned the right to not genuflect to anyone, but… where’s all the idealistic belief in building something better for tomorrow that they all portend to care about, from their own words? i don’t want to get political, and won’t, but… it feels like the most self-centered take on idealism since… aw shucks, yesterday… it’s my fault for putting these incredibly brilliant people on a pedestal, but i still find the whole thing incredibly disappointing, as someone who, well… idolizes them. and i would rather be disappointed than chastened and cynical— the world has PLENTY of that to go around, and i still believe in the power of the intellect to transcend this kind of bullshit, this case notwithstanding.
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The issue doesn't seem to be performance; it seems to still come down to being too eccentric for a lot of use-cases, and difficult to many humans to grasp. Lisp is not too difficult to grasp, it's that everyone suffers from infix operator brain damage inflicted in childhood. We are in the same place Europe was in 1300. Arabic numerals are here and clearly superior. But how do we know we can trust them? After all DCC…
It's not about prefix notation, it's that the fully uniform syntax has legitimate ergonomic problems for editing, human reading, and static analysis. Sexprs are better for computers than for humans in a lot of ways.
I see you are debating lisps ergonomics, but that doesn't dismiss the paradigm. Erlang Haskell and Prolog has far better syntax readability, so I don't see this as really relevant in discussing the alternative to Von Neuman.
There are other ergonomics issues beyond syntax that pose issues to adoption (Haskell in production has become something of a running gag). Moving the paradigm into a mixed language alongside procedural code seem to help a lot in seeing its adoption in recent years. (swift, rust, python, c++)
Re: The Future of Programming (2013) [video]
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not true at all IMO. Reading code is reading code regardless of whether you have a fancy IDE or not. S-expressions are indisputably harder to learn to read. Most languages have some flexibility in how you can format your code before it becomes unreadable or confusing. C has some, Lua has some, Ruby has some, and Python has maybe fewer but only because you're more tightly constrained by the whitespace syntax. Sexpr fa…
It surprised me to learn that John McCarthy never intended S-expressions to be the human-facing syntax of LISP. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
"One can even conjecture that LISP owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage"
Not the first time someone didn't realize what they had.