61–70 of 105 posts
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
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZipJOan54&t=1249s
It was a language designed alongside its IDE (which was a fairly rudimentary web app).
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, hoping to be able to get an "hello world" in qemu in a year or two of programming in my sparse free time ?
Ask an LLM to write all that would be so cool ?
Become a millionaire selling supplements, and fund a group of smart programmers to do it for me ?
Honest question. Once you've seen this "classic" talk ("classic", in the sense that it is now old enough to work in some countries), what did you start doing ? What did you stop doing ? What did you change ?
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
Love2D Demo https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/livelove
Language Demo https://gist.github.com/jasonjmcghee/09b274bf2211845c551d435...
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I wish to have the skills to explain my work as well as Bret Victor does. Editing, reverting, and committing parts of a running program feel alien to users.
Isn't that part of Paul Graham's startup lore? They were running lisp web servers for their ecommerce store and while a customer was on the phone with an issue, they would patch the server live and ask the customer to reload. Customers would hang up convinced it was their personal glitch.
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
I've dabbled a lot in this space as well- built an experimental language that natively supported live-coding, after building live coding capabilities through LSP for love2d (Lua) to get a feel for the feature set I wanted etc Love2D Demo https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/livelove Language Demo https://gist.github.com/jasonjmcghee/09b274bf2211845c551d435...
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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...
There is a movie about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project "Colossus requests to be linked to Guardian. The President allows this, hoping to determine the Soviet machine's capability. The Soviets also agree to the experiment. Colossus and Guardian begin to slowly communicate using elementary mathematics (2x1=2), to everyone's amusement. However, this amusement turns to shock and amazement…
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I've dabbled a lot in this space as well- built an experimental language that natively supported live-coding, after building live coding capabilities through LSP for love2d (Lua) to get a feel for the feature set I wanted etc Love2D Demo https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/livelove Language Demo https://gist.github.com/jasonjmcghee/09b274bf2211845c551d435...
Nice, the main problem is a broken state. I use immutability at the language level to prevent disaster code changes. So, the program during live coding is literally unkillable, and you can jump back to the saved checkpoints without restarts.
I made the decision that state management is manual - the "once" keyword. Any expression/block not using "once" is re-evaluated any time there's a change to the code. If it's using it, it only re-evaluates if you change the (depth 0) code of that once wrapped expression.
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Nice, the main problem is a broken state. I use immutability at the language level to prevent disaster code changes. So, the program during live coding is literally unkillable, and you can jump back to the saved checkpoints without restarts.
Yeah the language here has a notion of the "last good state" so it can keep running. In the demo I'm not hitting "save" - the moment there's a good state, it becomes the "current version" - but there's no reason it needs to be that way. I made the decision that state management is manual - the "once" keyword. Any expression/block not using "once" is re-evaluated any time there's a change to the code. If it's using it…
The Future of Programming (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746821 - July 2025 (10 comments)
Bret Victor – The Future of Programming (2013) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944225 - May 2025 (1 comment)
The Future of Programming (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32912639 - Sept 2022 (1 comment)
The Future of Programming (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15539766 - Oct 2017 (66 comments)
References for “The Future of Programming” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051577 - July 2016 (26 comments)
Bret Victor The Future of Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050549 - July 2014 (2 comments)
The Future of Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6129148 - July 2013 (341 comments)
Call 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…
That depends on your goals. If you are into building systems for selling them (or production), then you are bound by the business model (platform vs library) and use cases (to make money). Otherwise, you are more limited in time.
To think more realistically about reality you have to work with, take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cum5uN2634o about types of (software) systems (decay), then decide what you would like to simplify and what you are willing to invest. If you want to properly fix stuff, unfortunately often you have to first properly (formally) specify the current system(s) (design space) to use it as (test,etc) reference for (partial) replacement/improvement/extension system(s).
What these type of lectures usually skip over (as the essentials) are the involved complexity, solution trade-offs and interoperability for meaningful use cases with current hw/sw/tools.