4 ms·

So. Minus all the doom and gloom. Better safety harnesses, better developer abstractions, more interactive/responsive programming environments. Whatever Bret Vi

So. Minus all the doom and gloom. Better safety harnesses, better developer abstractions, more interactive/responsive programming environments. Whatever Bret Victor's selling, I'm not buying. He's the type of self-promoter who doesn't acknowledge all the actual hard work that has been going on for decades in all of these areas.

worldsayshi 9y ago
If someone actually want to work with such things as opposed to trying to solve the problem directly with huga amounts of code, where to apply?
shalabhc 9y ago
Can you point to what work specifically has improved the situation in terms of `developer abstractions` and `interactive/responsive programming` in the last few decades?
- igravious 9y ago
  Yup, I can. Safety harnesses -> work in type theory and proof theory, witness the success of Rust and Haskell and Coq and so on. Developer abstractions -> work on design patterns and anti-patterns among other things. interactive/responsive programming -> IDEs, refactoring, time-travel debugging, visual programming spring to mind. To write off all these advances is suspect in my opinion. Also, why so glass half empty? Why not glass half full? Why not say, "wow – given how many lines of code are out there isn't it amazing how much has not gone tits-up? (pardon the expression!) That wouldn't fit the Bret Victor narrative though. One last thing – the claim that we are oh so crap at manipulating symbolic machinery. That too is suspect, one could argue we actually seem hard-wired through evolution for linguistic, logical, and symbolic thought.
  - shalabhc 9y ago
    > interactive/responsive programming -> IDEs, refactoring, time-travel debugging, visual programming spring to mind. > one could argue we actually seem hard-wired through evolution for linguistic, logical, and symbolic thought. I think you're still talking about programming environments layered on top of the text centric representation, while Victor seems to be talking about something a little different. Sure we can do some symbolic and linguistic manipulation, but consider that rigorous blueprints for physical products such as cars and buildings are 'diagrams', not text. So purely language based description and manipulation doesn't apply everywhere. Now, what if many programs, or parts of programs may be better represented not as text with symbols, but in some other form that we haven't discovered yet?
  - shalabhc 9y ago
    > To write off all these advances is suspect in my opinion. > That wouldn't fit the Bret Victor narrative though. Consider the possibility that there are real gaps people see and are trying to fill, rather than just trying to 'fit' a particular narrative.
bitwize 9y ago
Bret Victor is like an "all-mouth-and-no-trousers" version of Alan Kay. And many of his talks recapitulate work that Kay and Ingalls did in Smalltalk and Squeak in their various forms. His sexy presentations very closely resemble the "Active Essays" that got promulgated in the Squeak project in the 90s.
- scroot 9y ago
  Dude's got a research lab where they're building things. What counts as trousers?

worldsayshi 9y ago

If someone actually want to work with such things as opposed to trying to solve the problem directly with huga amounts of code, where to apply?

shalabhc 9y ago

Can you point to what work specifically has improved the situation in terms of `developer abstractions` and `interactive/responsive programming` in the last few decades?

igravious 9y ago
Yup, I can. Safety harnesses -> work in type theory and proof theory, witness the success of Rust and Haskell and Coq and so on. Developer abstractions -> work on design patterns and anti-patterns among other things. interactive/responsive programming -> IDEs, refactoring, time-travel debugging, visual programming spring to mind. To write off all these advances is suspect in my opinion. Also, why so glass half empty? Why not glass half full? Why not say, "wow – given how many lines of code are out there isn't it amazing how much has not gone tits-up? (pardon the expression!) That wouldn't fit the Bret Victor narrative though. One last thing – the claim that we are oh so crap at manipulating symbolic machinery. That too is suspect, one could argue we actually seem hard-wired through evolution for linguistic, logical, and symbolic thought.
- shalabhc 9y ago
  > interactive/responsive programming -> IDEs, refactoring, time-travel debugging, visual programming spring to mind. > one could argue we actually seem hard-wired through evolution for linguistic, logical, and symbolic thought. I think you're still talking about programming environments layered on top of the text centric representation, while Victor seems to be talking about something a little different. Sure we can do some symbolic and linguistic manipulation, but consider that rigorous blueprints for physical products such as cars and buildings are 'diagrams', not text. So purely language based description and manipulation doesn't apply everywhere. Now, what if many programs, or parts of programs may be better represented not as text with symbols, but in some other form that we haven't discovered yet?
- shalabhc 9y ago
  > To write off all these advances is suspect in my opinion. > That wouldn't fit the Bret Victor narrative though. Consider the possibility that there are real gaps people see and are trying to fill, rather than just trying to 'fit' a particular narrative.

bitwize 9y ago

Bret Victor is like an "all-mouth-and-no-trousers" version of Alan Kay. And many of his talks recapitulate work that Kay and Ingalls did in Smalltalk and Squeak in their various forms. His sexy presentations very closely resemble the "Active Essays" that got promulgated in the Squeak project in the 90s.

scroot 9y ago
Dude's got a research lab where they're building things. What counts as trousers?