12 ms·

Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC

177 points by skadamat 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
icebraining 9y ago
The lab's list of projects: http://harc.ycr.org/project/ http://harc.ycr.org/project/
- Confiks 9y ago
  Thanks for the link! I've seen an early alpha version of GP during the Scratch conference of 2016 (the 2017 conference is wrapping up tomorrow), and it worked awesomely, like a supercharged version of Scratch. A fun thing about it is that it features a very small VM, and the rest of the interface and blocks are written in GP itself, and can be readily inspected and modified.
- laxatives 9y ago
  Of all the orgs to have a live demo, I would have guessed Bret Victor's lab to it. Still, looks pretty interesting.
  - skadamat 9y ago
    They're rightfully waiting until they think things are ready to show. Danger of showing early is a recent memory in computing history (see Jobs / PARC visit)
    - danblick 9y ago
      From what I've heard of the Jobs/PARC visit I don't think I'd characterize it that way. In Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators" he says that Xerox had taken an ownership stake in Apple and some higher-ups decided to give them valuable tech. Also, Alan Kay had a Quora answer on this: https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-when-Steve-Jobs-visited https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-w...
      - skadamat 9y ago
        You're right and my comment made it seem like everyone has some grudge or something. I think in general the PARC community was weary that the takeaways would be centered around how computers, GUI, etc. were great ways of doing old things better (accounting, reading text, etc) instead of being captivated by computing as a medium for thinking. This happened with print, as Alan has discussed in some of his talks. The first 100 years of print was used to print and distributed religious text and it took a while before ideas that could probably only sprout in the print medium were invented (physics, calculus, some philosophies, etc). To some degree, I think some people feel like we're still in the "use print for spreading religious text" phase (or the "film is a great way of recording & distributing plays" phase.
- chii 9y ago
  wow, i didn't know that this is related to the eleVR thing i saw on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7yLL5fJxT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7yLL5fJxT4 (of vihart fame).
Pulcinella 9y ago
Bret Victor also gave a presentation at the Santa Fe Institute but I haven't seen a recording or transcript of it. https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-explaining-and-understanding-dy https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-explaining...
- skadamat 9y ago
  Yeah wasn't able to find a recording either :(
  - kennethfriedman 9y ago
    While I don't think there's a public recording of this version, BVic's talk with the same title "Words are Obsolete" was recorded in 2015[0]. I'm not sure if the demos were the same, but it's something. [0]: https://vimeo.com/114252897 https://vimeo.com/114252897
    - skadamat 9y ago
      You're probably right actually.
sushisource 9y ago
Not a comment on the content of the article, but I find it pretty obnoxious when an author uses a word like "hereodox" which has a much more commonly known nearly-exact synonym "unorthodox". It's hard to imagine any reason for that beyond "look at how clever of a writer I am".
- dcre 9y ago
  I find it obnoxious when a commenter whines about a single word in the first line of a long article. It's hard to imagine any reason for that beyond "look at how good of a complainer I am".
  - probablycorey 9y ago
    I agree with both of you.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    I think he was trying to be ironic by being picky and pedantic about the exact meaning of a word, while spelling it wrong at the same time. I took it as a successful attempt at self deprecating humor, by criticizing "clever writers" while ignoring the squiggly red line his spelling corrector drew under the word he was talking about.
- dang 9y ago
  Nearly-exact is definitely not exact. To my ear 'heterodox' connotes difference and pluralism while 'unorthodox' is more of a negation. (Of course other mileages may vary.) But different words always exist for a reason—if they didn't, one would have fallen out of use. Pretentiousness is not enough to keep a word alive!
  - wtvanhest 9y ago
    At risk of sounding foolish... I even read yours/his comments, and I am still confused. I am fairly confident that I have never seen the word heterodox used before.
mapcars 9y ago
It's good to see that development of such projects with innovative ideas exists and can transform our whole life experience into something completely different like technologies from the 70s did.
isnotchicago 9y ago
This is the first I had heard of Limn, and it looks like a really interesting magazine. What other great non-mainstream tech/design magazines are out there?
- utanapishtim 9y ago
  I thought so as well, I hope to see more answers to this post. I don't know if it is mainstream or not, but idn magazine is a great design mage; see here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.idnworld.com/mags/&ved=0ahUKEwiSksHvyprVAhVQ2GMKHemsDD4QFggnMAA&usg=AFQjCNGS18DhsPqdRHFrzBZdi-Kfx0jEqw https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://....
djtriptych 9y ago
I think I found a new dream job.
- skadamat 9y ago
  I heard from Alan that HARC is quite open and anybody can just drop by!
skadamat 9y ago
Bret's talks outline the general philosophy, motivation, and framework for the lab's work: - Seeing Spaces: https://vimeo.com/97903574 https://vimeo.com/97903574 - Humane Representation of Thought: https://vimeo.com/115154289 https://vimeo.com/115154289
jarmitage 9y ago
On the "don't let the prototype out of the lab too early" theme, it would be interesting to read an alternative history novel about a world where the Mother of All Demos never happened. And Von Neumann never spoke about his architecture. Etc. What are some good examples of prototypes or even mediums in the sense discussed here that were "let out" at "just the right time" or "too late"?
- skadamat 9y ago
  It's definitely an interesting thought. To some degree, it's maybe impossible to avoid the filtering down / reductionism of a big vision, even if you wait until things are polished. I think the hope with the Mother of All Demos was to try to shift people's thinking about computing and try to change where efforts were directed. You could imagine researchers attracted to the vision, working on problems there, and eventually working with commercial partners (or doing it themselves) to solve some of the technical, scale, and other problems that occur when a research vision goes through the filter of reality.
amasad 9y ago
I support this and find it really cool. However, I'd love to see less hero worship and more evidence. On its face there is nothing wrong with all those Alan Kay photos, but my feeling is that it's symptomatic of how much of what's being pursued rests on appeal to authority and/or nostalgia. To make this more concrete. Consider one of their projects (http://harc.ycr.org/project/ http://harc.ycr.org/project/), the Block-based programming: what's the evidence that this is a superior way for learning programming? What's the evidence that so-called computational thinking enhances cognitive ability or is transferrable to day-to-day thinking? Furthermore, much of their computer-based education ideas are based on Seymour Papert's research and ideas which in turn was based on Piaget's theories on mental development. Those theories, however, have been thoroughly challenged and is all but outdated. EDIT: this was the top comment and actively upvoted, now it seems that the mods have placed it at the end just before comments with negative points. I had heard of YC's sensitivity towards any criticism but this seems extreme. Whats the point discussions without criticism.
- jarmitage 9y ago
  Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are arguing for http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/ http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/
  - Cybiote 9y ago
    The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step. A famous counter-example is an abstract selection task which adults fail with high probability. Yet, when a structurally identical set of rules are given to ~9 years olds but couched in the language of permission, the children are able to pass with high probability. Stating the rules in terms of what the individual has experience with (or altering the linguistic phrasing) significantly increases the probability of solving much more than adjusting the age. So we have that on one hand, people develop capacities sooner (and more unevenly) than his theory supposed and that on another, some stages of reasoning aren't ever reached. amasad is wrong to imply that the field has not progressed beyond the ideas of Piaget. Although, people do often get the important parts of Papert's ideas wrong by focusing too much on the computer part of computer-based learning. The computer should be a means to an end, a tool to help the learner explore more possibilities, make the abstract more graspable and amplify one's ability to ask better questions.
throeaweigh 9y ago
i was fortunate enough to get a tour of HARC from Götz after the tour he asked me what i thought i explained the place looked like my 'play room' he pressed me, 'what does that look like?' 'an ideal, a sort of messy utopia'
germinalphrase 9y ago
Victor has indicated that his Realtalk group[0] at HARC is trying to release new research by the end of the year - so maybe we won't have to wait too long before learning a little more than this article provides. [0]https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/ https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  I recently asked Brett: "It's such a delight to introduce somebody to your work for the first time! I’m mentoring somebody at work in the ways of user interface design, and I just linked him to your classic “Magic Ink” article, and I am indulging myself by reading it again. You’ve written so much since then, that I have a lot of catching up to do. Any suggestions where I should start?" He referred me to these two articles: "If you're looking for something of mine to read, I'm partial to this one and this one." http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/ http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/ And here's a "secret internet video" (oops! ;) which Brett shared, "which doesn't really talk about what we're working towards but maybe gives some flavor of the material we're working with. (You might notice Chaim Gingold in a few shots -- the table with pinball etc. was his project.) Here's a vague description of the current system under development." http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-teaser-2017-02-21.mov http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-teaser-2017-02-2... https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/ https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/
  - Pulcinella 9y ago
    Video is gone :(
hyperdunc 9y ago
Not directly relevant to the article, but I love Bret's previous work in UX and data visualization[1]. [1] https://worrydream.com https://worrydream.com
moocowtruck 9y ago
momma said if i don't have anything nice to say keep it to myself
QuadrupleA 9y ago
What a bunch of of vague, hand-wavey nonsense (the article, not necessarily the HARC lab, I couldn't make heads or tails of what they actually do). Covers up its lack of clear thinking with an attempt to sound profound and obfuscatory in every sentence, like many academic articles. Also full of weird typos and misspellings (e.g. "mid 1970ties", "most currently available imaginaries about technologies"). I love Bret Victor's talks, in them he shows real engineering work and highly original ideas demonstrated with beautiful working prototypes. So don't want to sound like I'm knocking him. But reading this article makes it sound like some fool is footing the bill for endless navel-gazing and philosophizing. Some kind of strange architecture astronaut convention (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...) It's continuing the ongoing lowering of my opinion of Alan Kay too; the more I hear about him the more he seems like a good bullshitter who happened to write a programming language back in the day. "Kay combined them with ideas about pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics by Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and Jerome Bruner, and added further zest in form of the sassy media theoretical speculations of Marshall McLuhan." Wow, world changing stuff; if anyone knew what the hell it meant it'd probably have a big influence on the course of civilization. "So Kay took all of these ideas, desires, technologies, and opportunities, and recombined them. The results were crucial contributions to a new and emerging sociotechnical imaginary, in many ways representing the computer as a digital medium, which we now have today." Again, sounds really revolutionary, and wonderfully vauge enough that you could say he predicted pretty much everything that happened in the last 30 years. I say: ideas are cheap, especially vague ones. God bless the real engineers who make things work; photography and digital art were revolutionized with the availablility of programs like photoshop, not pseudo-philosphers bloviating about "representing the computer as a digital medium".
- sgentle 9y ago
  It's important not to let pragmatism wander into anti-intellectualism. "pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics" are all well-defined terms with non-bullshit meanings. Montessori, Papert and Bruner are well-known names whose theories would be familiar to anyone with a background in learning theory. McLuhan (the "medium is the message" guy) is similarly well-known in media circles, and if you want to understand why Alan Kay thinks he's important, he wrote about it: https://kokonautlabs.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/alan-kay-on-marshal-mcluhan-and-the-personal-computer/ https://kokonautlabs.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/alan-kay-on-ma... I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike the article or Kay, but the way that you got there seems to be by saying "they rely on a bunch of bullshit that nobody understands". How are you, presumably lacking a background in the ideas they are talking about, able to determine the difference between good theory and bullshit? If you want to reason about something, like how people learn, or how technology shapes thought, how would you do that without building a theory about it? How would you build that theory without ideas? How would you refer to those ideas without names? Is your criticism anything more than just that you don't know the names in a field you aren't familiar with? God bless the real engineers who make things work; programming and the personal computer were revolutionized with the availability of hardware like TTL ICs, not pseudo-engineers bloviating about "structured programming". But I've seen the code written by real engineers, and they could perhaps use a little less pragmatism and a little more theory. Thinking in abstractions can certainly lead to bullshit, but I'd rather that than no thinking at all.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
007panda 9y ago
I love academics who describe the technical work of engineers. I think this type of translation work is totally needed.
jecel 9y ago
I was confused about [and after 250 pages of thinking through a “reactive engine,” it culminates in a “handbook” for an imaginary “Flex Machine”: a first iteration of a set of ideas that culminated a few years later in Kay’s vision for a “DynaBook” (1972)] since as far as I know the Flex was actually built and tested on normal users (who didn't like it, according to Alan).
sn9 9y ago
I was really confused by the repeated use of "imaginaries" in the piece, but a quick Google suggests it's a case of sociological jargon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)

177 points by skadamat 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

icebraining 9y ago

The lab's list of projects: http://harc.ycr.org/project/ http://harc.ycr.org/project/

Confiks 9y ago
Thanks for the link! I've seen an early alpha version of GP during the Scratch conference of 2016 (the 2017 conference is wrapping up tomorrow), and it worked awesomely, like a supercharged version of Scratch. A fun thing about it is that it features a very small VM, and the rest of the interface and blocks are written in GP itself, and can be readily inspected and modified.
laxatives 9y ago
Of all the orgs to have a live demo, I would have guessed Bret Victor's lab to it. Still, looks pretty interesting.
- skadamat 9y ago
  They're rightfully waiting until they think things are ready to show. Danger of showing early is a recent memory in computing history (see Jobs / PARC visit)
  - danblick 9y ago
    From what I've heard of the Jobs/PARC visit I don't think I'd characterize it that way. In Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators" he says that Xerox had taken an ownership stake in Apple and some higher-ups decided to give them valuable tech. Also, Alan Kay had a Quora answer on this: https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-when-Steve-Jobs-visited https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-w...
    - skadamat 9y ago
      You're right and my comment made it seem like everyone has some grudge or something. I think in general the PARC community was weary that the takeaways would be centered around how computers, GUI, etc. were great ways of doing old things better (accounting, reading text, etc) instead of being captivated by computing as a medium for thinking. This happened with print, as Alan has discussed in some of his talks. The first 100 years of print was used to print and distributed religious text and it took a while before ideas that could probably only sprout in the print medium were invented (physics, calculus, some philosophies, etc). To some degree, I think some people feel like we're still in the "use print for spreading religious text" phase (or the "film is a great way of recording & distributing plays" phase.
chii 9y ago
wow, i didn't know that this is related to the eleVR thing i saw on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7yLL5fJxT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7yLL5fJxT4 (of vihart fame).

Pulcinella 9y ago

Bret Victor also gave a presentation at the Santa Fe Institute but I haven't seen a recording or transcript of it. https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-explaining-and-understanding-dy https://www.santafe.edu/events/words-are-obsolete-explaining...

skadamat 9y ago
Yeah wasn't able to find a recording either :(
- kennethfriedman 9y ago
  While I don't think there's a public recording of this version, BVic's talk with the same title "Words are Obsolete" was recorded in 2015[0]. I'm not sure if the demos were the same, but it's something. [0]: https://vimeo.com/114252897 https://vimeo.com/114252897
  - skadamat 9y ago
    You're probably right actually.

sushisource 9y ago

Not a comment on the content of the article, but I find it pretty obnoxious when an author uses a word like "hereodox" which has a much more commonly known nearly-exact synonym "unorthodox". It's hard to imagine any reason for that beyond "look at how clever of a writer I am".

dcre 9y ago
I find it obnoxious when a commenter whines about a single word in the first line of a long article. It's hard to imagine any reason for that beyond "look at how good of a complainer I am".
- probablycorey 9y ago
  I agree with both of you.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  I think he was trying to be ironic by being picky and pedantic about the exact meaning of a word, while spelling it wrong at the same time. I took it as a successful attempt at self deprecating humor, by criticizing "clever writers" while ignoring the squiggly red line his spelling corrector drew under the word he was talking about.
dang 9y ago
Nearly-exact is definitely not exact. To my ear 'heterodox' connotes difference and pluralism while 'unorthodox' is more of a negation. (Of course other mileages may vary.) But different words always exist for a reason—if they didn't, one would have fallen out of use. Pretentiousness is not enough to keep a word alive!
- wtvanhest 9y ago
  At risk of sounding foolish... I even read yours/his comments, and I am still confused. I am fairly confident that I have never seen the word heterodox used before.

mapcars 9y ago

It's good to see that development of such projects with innovative ideas exists and can transform our whole life experience into something completely different like technologies from the 70s did.

isnotchicago 9y ago

This is the first I had heard of Limn, and it looks like a really interesting magazine. What other great non-mainstream tech/design magazines are out there?

utanapishtim 9y ago
I thought so as well, I hope to see more answers to this post. I don't know if it is mainstream or not, but idn magazine is a great design mage; see here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.idnworld.com/mags/&ved=0ahUKEwiSksHvyprVAhVQ2GMKHemsDD4QFggnMAA&usg=AFQjCNGS18DhsPqdRHFrzBZdi-Kfx0jEqw https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://....

djtriptych 9y ago

I think I found a new dream job.

skadamat 9y ago
I heard from Alan that HARC is quite open and anybody can just drop by!

skadamat 9y ago

Bret's talks outline the general philosophy, motivation, and framework for the lab's work: - Seeing Spaces: https://vimeo.com/97903574 https://vimeo.com/97903574 - Humane Representation of Thought: https://vimeo.com/115154289 https://vimeo.com/115154289

jarmitage 9y ago

On the "don't let the prototype out of the lab too early" theme, it would be interesting to read an alternative history novel about a world where the Mother of All Demos never happened. And Von Neumann never spoke about his architecture. Etc. What are some good examples of prototypes or even mediums in the sense discussed here that were "let out" at "just the right time" or "too late"?

skadamat 9y ago
It's definitely an interesting thought. To some degree, it's maybe impossible to avoid the filtering down / reductionism of a big vision, even if you wait until things are polished. I think the hope with the Mother of All Demos was to try to shift people's thinking about computing and try to change where efforts were directed. You could imagine researchers attracted to the vision, working on problems there, and eventually working with commercial partners (or doing it themselves) to solve some of the technical, scale, and other problems that occur when a research vision goes through the filter of reality.

amasad 9y ago

I support this and find it really cool. However, I'd love to see less hero worship and more evidence. On its face there is nothing wrong with all those Alan Kay photos, but my feeling is that it's symptomatic of how much of what's being pursued rests on appeal to authority and/or nostalgia. To make this more concrete. Consider one of their projects (http://harc.ycr.org/project/ http://harc.ycr.org/project/), the Block-based programming: what's the evidence that this is a superior way for learning programming? What's the evidence that so-called computational thinking enhances cognitive ability or is transferrable to day-to-day thinking? Furthermore, much of their computer-based education ideas are based on Seymour Papert's research and ideas which in turn was based on Piaget's theories on mental development. Those theories, however, have been thoroughly challenged and is all but outdated. EDIT: this was the top comment and actively upvoted, now it seems that the mods have placed it at the end just before comments with negative points. I had heard of YC's sensitivity towards any criticism but this seems extreme. Whats the point discussions without criticism.

jarmitage 9y ago
Got links for crits of Papert / Piaget and modern alternatives? Constructivism at least appears to be live and kicking in the MIT Media Lab hype world Edit: also on computational thinking, I'm not sure that's what people are arguing for http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/ http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/
- Cybiote 9y ago
  The main failures of Piaget's work is that it assumes a smooth progression in reasoning facilities with age and secondly, that its notion of formal operations rests too much on deductive logic. But humans do not really reason logically: affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent are fallacies often encountered. However, as the 19th century logician Peirce once stated, Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step. A famous counter-example is an abstract selection task which adults fail with high probability. Yet, when a structurally identical set of rules are given to ~9 years olds but couched in the language of permission, the children are able to pass with high probability. Stating the rules in terms of what the individual has experience with (or altering the linguistic phrasing) significantly increases the probability of solving much more than adjusting the age. So we have that on one hand, people develop capacities sooner (and more unevenly) than his theory supposed and that on another, some stages of reasoning aren't ever reached. amasad is wrong to imply that the field has not progressed beyond the ideas of Piaget. Although, people do often get the important parts of Papert's ideas wrong by focusing too much on the computer part of computer-based learning. The computer should be a means to an end, a tool to help the learner explore more possibilities, make the abstract more graspable and amplify one's ability to ask better questions.

throeaweigh 9y ago

i was fortunate enough to get a tour of HARC from Götz after the tour he asked me what i thought i explained the place looked like my 'play room' he pressed me, 'what does that look like?' 'an ideal, a sort of messy utopia'

germinalphrase 9y ago

Victor has indicated that his Realtalk group[0] at HARC is trying to release new research by the end of the year - so maybe we won't have to wait too long before learning a little more than this article provides. [0]https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/ https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/

DonHopkins 9y ago
I recently asked Brett: "It's such a delight to introduce somebody to your work for the first time! I’m mentoring somebody at work in the ways of user interface design, and I just linked him to your classic “Magic Ink” article, and I am indulging myself by reading it again. You’ve written so much since then, that I have a lot of catching up to do. Any suggestions where I should start?" He referred me to these two articles: "If you're looking for something of mine to read, I'm partial to this one and this one." http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/ http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/ And here's a "secret internet video" (oops! ;) which Brett shared, "which doesn't really talk about what we're working towards but maybe gives some flavor of the material we're working with. (You might notice Chaim Gingold in a few shots -- the table with pinball etc. was his project.) Here's a vague description of the current system under development." http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-teaser-2017-02-21.mov http://worrydream.com/oatmeal/realtalk-tech-teaser-2017-02-2... https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/ https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk/
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  Video is gone :(

hyperdunc 9y ago

Not directly relevant to the article, but I love Bret's previous work in UX and data visualization[1]. [1] https://worrydream.com https://worrydream.com

moocowtruck 9y ago

momma said if i don't have anything nice to say keep it to myself

QuadrupleA 9y ago

What a bunch of of vague, hand-wavey nonsense (the article, not necessarily the HARC lab, I couldn't make heads or tails of what they actually do). Covers up its lack of clear thinking with an attempt to sound profound and obfuscatory in every sentence, like many academic articles. Also full of weird typos and misspellings (e.g. "mid 1970ties", "most currently available imaginaries about technologies"). I love Bret Victor's talks, in them he shows real engineering work and highly original ideas demonstrated with beautiful working prototypes. So don't want to sound like I'm knocking him. But reading this article makes it sound like some fool is footing the bill for endless navel-gazing and philosophizing. Some kind of strange architecture astronaut convention (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...) It's continuing the ongoing lowering of my opinion of Alan Kay too; the more I hear about him the more he seems like a good bullshitter who happened to write a programming language back in the day. "Kay combined them with ideas about pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics by Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and Jerome Bruner, and added further zest in form of the sassy media theoretical speculations of Marshall McLuhan." Wow, world changing stuff; if anyone knew what the hell it meant it'd probably have a big influence on the course of civilization. "So Kay took all of these ideas, desires, technologies, and opportunities, and recombined them. The results were crucial contributions to a new and emerging sociotechnical imaginary, in many ways representing the computer as a digital medium, which we now have today." Again, sounds really revolutionary, and wonderfully vauge enough that you could say he predicted pretty much everything that happened in the last 30 years. I say: ideas are cheap, especially vague ones. God bless the real engineers who make things work; photography and digital art were revolutionized with the availablility of programs like photoshop, not pseudo-philosphers bloviating about "representing the computer as a digital medium".

sgentle 9y ago
It's important not to let pragmatism wander into anti-intellectualism. "pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics" are all well-defined terms with non-bullshit meanings. Montessori, Papert and Bruner are well-known names whose theories would be familiar to anyone with a background in learning theory. McLuhan (the "medium is the message" guy) is similarly well-known in media circles, and if you want to understand why Alan Kay thinks he's important, he wrote about it: https://kokonautlabs.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/alan-kay-on-marshal-mcluhan-and-the-personal-computer/ https://kokonautlabs.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/alan-kay-on-ma... I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike the article or Kay, but the way that you got there seems to be by saying "they rely on a bunch of bullshit that nobody understands". How are you, presumably lacking a background in the ideas they are talking about, able to determine the difference between good theory and bullshit? If you want to reason about something, like how people learn, or how technology shapes thought, how would you do that without building a theory about it? How would you build that theory without ideas? How would you refer to those ideas without names? Is your criticism anything more than just that you don't know the names in a field you aren't familiar with? God bless the real engineers who make things work; programming and the personal computer were revolutionized with the availability of hardware like TTL ICs, not pseudo-engineers bloviating about "structured programming". But I've seen the code written by real engineers, and they could perhaps use a little less pragmatism and a little more theory. Thinking in abstractions can certainly lead to bullshit, but I'd rather that than no thinking at all.

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007panda 9y ago

I love academics who describe the technical work of engineers. I think this type of translation work is totally needed.

jecel 9y ago

I was confused about [and after 250 pages of thinking through a “reactive engine,” it culminates in a “handbook” for an imaginary “Flex Machine”: a first iteration of a set of ideas that culminated a few years later in Kay’s vision for a “DynaBook” (1972)] since as far as I know the Flex was actually built and tested on normal users (who didn't like it, according to Alan).

sn9 9y ago

I was really confused by the repeated use of "imaginaries" in the piece, but a quick Google suggests it's a case of sociological jargon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology)