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Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

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Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#4

Post by jayvanguard »

Great presentation as usual. One fundamental tension I see in much of the work he does is between purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments.

The challenge in both the maker space as well as much of the visual learning and programming material he has done previously is that each of them is incredibly time consuming to adapt to each new different project. In the real world even similar tasks within projects in the same domain often have enough subtle differences that re-use is not possible or very costly.

That isn't to say these are insurmountable but maybe much of the focus needs to be on meta-tooling that can accelerate the work of experts to build these purpose-built environments (as opposed to making generic tooling).

Inspiring stuff.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#5

Post by cing »

In other words... a meatspace debugger? Cool idea, but I don't quite buy the comparison to "spaces laden with sensors and visualizations" like the NASA control center, Large Hadron Collider, etc.. All of those spaces revolve around monitoring, not the design/making process. In a similar vein, in my field of computational science, heaps of money has been invested in spaces for data exploration/visualization [1], unfortunately, they are essentially useless for the scientific process.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environm...

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#8

Post by 3JPLW »

jayvanguard wrote: post #4

Great presentation as usual. One fundamental tension I see in much of the work he does is between purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments. The challenge in both the maker space as well as much of the visual learning and programming material he has done previously is that each of them is incredibly time consuming to adapt to each new different project. In the real world even similar tasks within pro…

> purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments

That seemed to me to be a big unresolved tension in his comparison between command centers and physical workshops. Command centers still just have lots of general use multi-purpose workstations. TV stations do much better on this point, interestingly.

While they all allow for seeing, I wonder what kinds of improvements we could have with purpose-built HID.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#9

Post by ColinDabritz »

mrspeaker wrote: post #2

Every time I realize I'm guessing about (rather than directly seeing) the behavior of my code I think of Bret's talks. I never actually improve my workflow, but at least now I'm angry about it!

Interesting. I frequently think back to his talks and use it as a framework to guide my approach especially when debugging. I think about what I can see, and what I can't, and try to address what I can't see. This process has broken through many bugs that seem challenging until they are visible.
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