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The Viewpoints Research Institute is going to be the Xerox PARC of our generation. They're developing this really cool computing model which is user-friendly a

The Viewpoints Research Institute is going to be the Xerox PARC of our generation. They're developing this really cool computing model which is user-friendly and extendable, and it just makes sense for removing unnecessary details in programming, allowing you to center on one aspect of the program at a time - reducing complexity in a way that classic text-based languages + IDEs are not able. It improves the current state of interaction with computers, in the same way that PARC's windowing desktop with direct manipulation improved over the existing form-based applications of the time. I expect the next 30 years of computing tools to be heavily based on that model.

sparkie 11y ago
There are certainly ideas coming from VPRI which will make it into mainstream use, but there's a big difference between it and Xerox PARC - namely, Inertia. PARC was developing from mostly a clean slate and got to define how computing would become for the average user. (And let's face it, not all of what came out of PARC was good. The windowing desktop has its flaws). Nowadays everyone already has an electronic device and there are thousands of other companies working on related research. It's unlikely, in this context, that the VPRI can have such a massive impact - particularly when they've decided to use tools (ie, Smalltalk) that the rest of the computing industry rejected decades ago (whether for the right reasons or not, the superstition is already in place, and reversing that attitude isn't going to happen quickly). I'm a fan of some of the work VPRI has done, especially Gezira, but it's only a small part of a much bigger picture, and there's no silver bullet in computing. I've seen work from outside of the VPRI which is likely to have a larger impact on the state of software development, and hardware developments which seem impossible to succeed given the current state of software. It will be a nice fairytale in 30 years if we can point at one company for creating what has become, but it ignores the tens of thousands of research papers that contributed to the current state of computing, and the state which it will become. What's more fascinating about the VPRI isn't the results, but the methods. Start by throwing away superstition about how computing is currently done and lets look at other ways we could do it, rooted in well-understood theory. It's a shame that this kind of development is rare and most of the industry is bandwagon-hopping.
- TuringTest 11y ago
  > hey've decided to use tools (ie, Smalltalk) that the rest of the computing industry rejected decades ago Hey, the Alto wasn't the technological basis for the desktop environment either - it took a different company to popularize the format (Apple's Lisa and the Macintosh). The good thing is that the ideas are spreading - Victor Bret's talks have had a significant impact in developer circles, and more people are taking parts of them in their own project, or at least recognize them and understand their value. If this means that, this time around, adopting the methods will take a distributed approach of many people including piecemeal parts of the global idea in their pet projects - rather than everything coming together from a single entity, so be it. The times are a-changin'. > Start by throwing away superstition about how computing is currently done and lets look at other ways we could do it, rooted in well-understood theory. It's a shame that this kind of development is rare and most of the industry is bandwagon-hopping. Agree. I believe it's largely a matter of inertia, of which computing industry is a major culprit. Back in my time we learned to build the control flow of applications for the command line using a top-down main menu, that stalled waiting for user input, and then called the subroutine for the selected command when the user choose its action number; that was simply how applications were made, we simply didn't know there was a different way. Yet nowadays everyone knows how to use an active event-loop that mixes user- and application-initiated actions. But at the end, all that inertia is overcome when knowledge about the best processes spreads. The form fields and radio options in HTML appear in essentially the same shape of banking applications in the 60s, which were the result of user-centered research and thus are well suited for the problem they solve. But we now use declarative languages for building the forms and have specific widgets for accessing their values, instead of relying on ad-hoc low-level code for showing the fields and reading their input. So there's hope that in the long term the best ideas spread, and ultimately they become unattached from the legacy practices where they were first seen.
cloudmike 11y ago
You might consider shifting some of your enthusiasm from VPRI to CDG Labs, where a fascinating group has come together around Alan Kay. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-to-xerox-for-r-d-inspiration-builds-idea-lab http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-...
- TuringTest 11y ago
  Yeah - I'm already following the development of Apparatus, the visually programmable slide editor. I didn't know they were related through Alan Kay, but it doesn't surprise me to learn it. :-) [1] https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus
- msutherl 11y ago
  VPRI and CDG operate in parallel, with Alan in LA and Bret Victor + others in San Francisco.

sparkie 11y ago

There are certainly ideas coming from VPRI which will make it into mainstream use, but there's a big difference between it and Xerox PARC - namely, Inertia. PARC was developing from mostly a clean slate and got to define how computing would become for the average user. (And let's face it, not all of what came out of PARC was good. The windowing desktop has its flaws). Nowadays everyone already has an electronic device and there are thousands of other companies working on related research. It's unlikely, in this context, that the VPRI can have such a massive impact - particularly when they've decided to use tools (ie, Smalltalk) that the rest of the computing industry rejected decades ago (whether for the right reasons or not, the superstition is already in place, and reversing that attitude isn't going to happen quickly). I'm a fan of some of the work VPRI has done, especially Gezira, but it's only a small part of a much bigger picture, and there's no silver bullet in computing. I've seen work from outside of the VPRI which is likely to have a larger impact on the state of software development, and hardware developments which seem impossible to succeed given the current state of software. It will be a nice fairytale in 30 years if we can point at one company for creating what has become, but it ignores the tens of thousands of research papers that contributed to the current state of computing, and the state which it will become. What's more fascinating about the VPRI isn't the results, but the methods. Start by throwing away superstition about how computing is currently done and lets look at other ways we could do it, rooted in well-understood theory. It's a shame that this kind of development is rare and most of the industry is bandwagon-hopping.

TuringTest 11y ago
> hey've decided to use tools (ie, Smalltalk) that the rest of the computing industry rejected decades ago Hey, the Alto wasn't the technological basis for the desktop environment either - it took a different company to popularize the format (Apple's Lisa and the Macintosh). The good thing is that the ideas are spreading - Victor Bret's talks have had a significant impact in developer circles, and more people are taking parts of them in their own project, or at least recognize them and understand their value. If this means that, this time around, adopting the methods will take a distributed approach of many people including piecemeal parts of the global idea in their pet projects - rather than everything coming together from a single entity, so be it. The times are a-changin'. > Start by throwing away superstition about how computing is currently done and lets look at other ways we could do it, rooted in well-understood theory. It's a shame that this kind of development is rare and most of the industry is bandwagon-hopping. Agree. I believe it's largely a matter of inertia, of which computing industry is a major culprit. Back in my time we learned to build the control flow of applications for the command line using a top-down main menu, that stalled waiting for user input, and then called the subroutine for the selected command when the user choose its action number; that was simply how applications were made, we simply didn't know there was a different way. Yet nowadays everyone knows how to use an active event-loop that mixes user- and application-initiated actions. But at the end, all that inertia is overcome when knowledge about the best processes spreads. The form fields and radio options in HTML appear in essentially the same shape of banking applications in the 60s, which were the result of user-centered research and thus are well suited for the problem they solve. But we now use declarative languages for building the forms and have specific widgets for accessing their values, instead of relying on ad-hoc low-level code for showing the fields and reading their input. So there's hope that in the long term the best ideas spread, and ultimately they become unattached from the legacy practices where they were first seen.

cloudmike 11y ago

You might consider shifting some of your enthusiasm from VPRI to CDG Labs, where a fascinating group has come together around Alan Kay. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-to-xerox-for-r-d-inspiration-builds-idea-lab http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/sap-looks-...

TuringTest 11y ago
Yeah - I'm already following the development of Apparatus, the visually programmable slide editor. I didn't know they were related through Alan Kay, but it doesn't surprise me to learn it. :-) [1] https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus
msutherl 11y ago
VPRI and CDG operate in parallel, with Alan in LA and Bret Victor + others in San Francisco.