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Hrmmm ... you seem to still be tremendously missing the overarching purpose of this speech. Obviously to delve proficiently into every aspect of programming thr

Hrmmm ... you seem to still be tremendously missing the overarching purpose of this speech. Obviously to delve proficiently into every aspect of programming through the ages and why things are the way they are now (e.g. what 'won' out and why) would require a Course and not a talk. You seem to think that the points brought up in this talk diminish the idea that things now DO work. However, what was stressed was avoiding the trap of discontinuing the pursuit of thinking outside the box. I am also questioning how much of the video you actually paid attention too (note: I am not questioning how much you watched). I say this because your critique is focused on the topics that he covered in the earlier parts of the video and then (LOL) you quickly criticize him for talking about concurrency (in your previous comment)... I clearly remember him talking about programming on Massively Parallel architectures without the need for sequential logic control via multiplexing using threads and locks. I imagine, though, it is possible you did not critique this point because it is obvious (to everyone) that this is the ultimate direction of computing (synchronously with the end of Moore’s law as well). Ahhh now that’s interesting, we are entering an era where there could possibly be a legitimate use to trying/conceiving new methods of programming? Who would have thought? Maybe you just realized that you would have looked extremely foolish spending time on critiquing that point? IDK … excuse my ignorance. Also you constantly argue FOR basic management techniques and methods (as if that countermoves Bret’s arguments) … but you fail to realize that spatial structuring of programs would be a visual management technique in itself that could THEN too have tools developed along with it that would be isomorphic to modern integration, testing management. But I won’t bother delving into that subject as I am much more ignorant on this and more importantly … I would hate to upset you, Master. Oh and btw (before accusations fly) I am not a Hero worshiper … this is the first time I have ever even heard of Bret Victor. Please don’t gasp too loud.

Ygg2 13y ago
I definetely get what OP was trying to say. Bret presented something that sounds a lot like the future even though it definitely isn't. Some of listed alternatives like direct data manipulation, or visual languages or non-text languages have MAJOR deficiences and stumbling blocks that prevented them from achieving dominance. Though in some cases it basically does boil down to which is cheaper, more familiar.
- jfarmer 13y ago
  I think the title of Bret's presentation was meant to be ironic. I think he meant something like this. If you want to see the future of computing just look at all the things in computing's past that we've "forgotten" or "written off." Maybe we should look at some of those ideas we've dismissed, those ideas that we've decided "have MAJOR deficiencies and stumbling blocks", and write them back in? The times have changed. Our devices are faster, denser, and cheaper now. Maybe let's go revisit the past and see what we wrote off because our devices then were too slow, too sparse, or too expensive. We shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that we can see clearer or farther than the people who came before. That's a theme I see in many of Bret's talks. I spend my days thinking about programming education and I can relate. The art when it comes to programming education today is a not even close to the ideas described in Seymour Papert's Mindstorms, which he wrote in 1980. LOGO had its failings but at least it was visionary. What are MOOCs doing to push the state of the art, really? Not that it's their job to push the state of the art -- but somebody should be! This is consistent with other thing's he's written. For example, read A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design (http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...). Not only does he use the same word in his title ("future"), but he makes similar points and relates the future to the past in a similar way. "And yes, the fruits of this research are still crude, rudimentary, and sometimes kind of dubious. But look — In 1968 — three years before the invention of the microprocessor — Alan Kay stumbled across Don Bitzer's early flat-panel display. Its resolution was 16 pixels by 16 pixels — an impressive improvement over their earlier 4 pixel by 4 pixel display. Alan saw those 256 glowing orange squares, and he went home, and he picked up a pen, and he drew a picture of a goddamn iPad. [picture of a device sketch that looks essentially identical to an iPad] And then he chased that carrot through decades of groundbreaking research, much of which is responsible for the hardware and software that you're currently reading this with. That's the kind of ambitious, long-range vision I'm talking about. Pictures Under Glass is old news. Let's start using our hands."
  - RogerL 13y ago
    Okay. Single fingers are a amazing input device because of dexterity. Flat phones are amazing because they fit in my pockets. Text search is amazing because with 26 symbols I can query a very significant portion of world knowledge (I can't search for, say, a painting that looks like a Van Gogh by some other painter, so there are limits, obviously). Maybe it is just a tone thing. Alan Kay did something notable - he drew the iPad, he didn't run around saying "somebody should invent something based on this thing I saw". Flat works, and so do fingers. If you are going to denigrate design based on that, well, let's see the alternative that is superior. I'd love to live through a Xerox kind of revolution again.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I get it, I really do. And I'm very sympathetic to Victor's goals. I just don't buy it, I think he's mistaken about the most important factors to unlock innovation in programming. His central conceit is the idea is that various revolutionary computing concepts which first surfaced in the early days of programming (the 1960s and '70s) have since been abandoned in favor of boring workaday tools of much more limited potential. More so that new, revolutionary concepts in programming haven't received attention because programmers have become too narrow minded. And that is very simply fundamentally an untrue characterization of reality. Sure, let's look at concurrency, one of his examples. He bemoans the parallelization model of sequential programming with threads and locks as being excessively complex and inherently self-limited. And he's absolutely correct, it's a horrible method of parallelism. But it's not as though people aren't aware of that, or as though people haven't been actively developing alternate, highly innovative ways to tackle the problem every year since the 1970s. Look at Haskell, OCaml,vector computing, CUDA/GPU coding, or node.js. Or Scala, Erlang, or Rust, all three of which implement the touted revolutionary "actor model" that Victor brandishes. Or look at direct data manipulations as "programming". This hasn't been ignored, it's been actively worked on in every way imaginable. CASE programming received a lot of attention, and still does. Various workflow based programming models have received just as much attention. What about Flash? Hypercard? Etc. And there are many niche uses where direct data manipulation has proven to be highly useful. But again and again it's proven to be basically incompatible with general purpose programming, likely because of a fundamental impedance mismatch. A total of billions of dollars in investment has gone into these technologies, it's counterfactual to put forward the notion that we are blind to alternatives or that we haven't tried. Or look at his example of the smalltalk browser. How can any modern coder look at that and not laugh. Any modern IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio can present to the developer exactly that interface. Again and again it looks either like Victor is either blindly ignorant of the practice of programming in the real-world or he is simply adhering to the "no true Scottsman" fallacy. Imagining that the ideas he brings up haven't "truly" been tried, not seriously and honestly, they've just been toyed with and abandoned. Except that in some cases, such as the actor model, they have not just been tried they've been developed into robust solutions and they are made use of in industry when and if they are warranted. It's hilarious that we're even having this discussion on a forum written in Arc, of all things. To circle back to the particular examples I gave of alternative important advances in programming (focusing on development velocity and reliability), I find it amusing and ironic that some folks so easily dismiss these ideas because they are so seemingly mundane. But they are mundane in precisely the ways that structured programming was mundane when it was in its infancy. It was easy to write off structured programming as nothing more than clerical work preparatory to actual programming, but now we know that not to be true. It's also quite easy to write off testing and integration, as examples, as extraneous supporting work that falls outside "real programming". However, I believe that when the tooling of programming advances to more intimately embrace these things we'll see an unprecedented explosion in programming innovation and productivity, to a degree where people used to relying on such tools will look on our programming today as just as primitive as folks using pre-structured programming appear to us today. Certainly a lot of programmers today have their heads down, because they're concentrated on the work immediately in front of them. But the idea that programming as a whole is trapped inside some sort of "box" which it is incapable of contemplating the outside of is utterly wrong with numerous examples of substantial and fundamental innovation happening all the time. I think Victor is annoyed that the perfect ideal of those concepts he mentions haven't magically achieved reification without accumulating the necessary complexity and kruft that comes with translating abstract ideas into practical realities. And I think he's annoyed that fundamentally flawed and imperfect ideas, such as the x86 architecture, continue to survive and be immanently practical solutions decade after decade after decade. It turns out that the real world doesn't give a crap about our aesthetic sensibilities, sometimes the best solution isn't always elegant. To people who refuse to poke their head out of the elegance box the world will always seem as though it turned its back on perfection.

Ygg2 13y ago

I definetely get what OP was trying to say. Bret presented something that sounds a lot like the future even though it definitely isn't. Some of listed alternatives like direct data manipulation, or visual languages or non-text languages have MAJOR deficiences and stumbling blocks that prevented them from achieving dominance. Though in some cases it basically does boil down to which is cheaper, more familiar.

jfarmer 13y ago
I think the title of Bret's presentation was meant to be ironic. I think he meant something like this. If you want to see the future of computing just look at all the things in computing's past that we've "forgotten" or "written off." Maybe we should look at some of those ideas we've dismissed, those ideas that we've decided "have MAJOR deficiencies and stumbling blocks", and write them back in? The times have changed. Our devices are faster, denser, and cheaper now. Maybe let's go revisit the past and see what we wrote off because our devices then were too slow, too sparse, or too expensive. We shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that we can see clearer or farther than the people who came before. That's a theme I see in many of Bret's talks. I spend my days thinking about programming education and I can relate. The art when it comes to programming education today is a not even close to the ideas described in Seymour Papert's Mindstorms, which he wrote in 1980. LOGO had its failings but at least it was visionary. What are MOOCs doing to push the state of the art, really? Not that it's their job to push the state of the art -- but somebody should be! This is consistent with other thing's he's written. For example, read A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design (http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...). Not only does he use the same word in his title ("future"), but he makes similar points and relates the future to the past in a similar way. "And yes, the fruits of this research are still crude, rudimentary, and sometimes kind of dubious. But look — In 1968 — three years before the invention of the microprocessor — Alan Kay stumbled across Don Bitzer's early flat-panel display. Its resolution was 16 pixels by 16 pixels — an impressive improvement over their earlier 4 pixel by 4 pixel display. Alan saw those 256 glowing orange squares, and he went home, and he picked up a pen, and he drew a picture of a goddamn iPad. [picture of a device sketch that looks essentially identical to an iPad] And then he chased that carrot through decades of groundbreaking research, much of which is responsible for the hardware and software that you're currently reading this with. That's the kind of ambitious, long-range vision I'm talking about. Pictures Under Glass is old news. Let's start using our hands."
- RogerL 13y ago
  Okay. Single fingers are a amazing input device because of dexterity. Flat phones are amazing because they fit in my pockets. Text search is amazing because with 26 symbols I can query a very significant portion of world knowledge (I can't search for, say, a painting that looks like a Van Gogh by some other painter, so there are limits, obviously). Maybe it is just a tone thing. Alan Kay did something notable - he drew the iPad, he didn't run around saying "somebody should invent something based on this thing I saw". Flat works, and so do fingers. If you are going to denigrate design based on that, well, let's see the alternative that is superior. I'd love to live through a Xerox kind of revolution again.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

I get it, I really do. And I'm very sympathetic to Victor's goals. I just don't buy it, I think he's mistaken about the most important factors to unlock innovation in programming. His central conceit is the idea is that various revolutionary computing concepts which first surfaced in the early days of programming (the 1960s and '70s) have since been abandoned in favor of boring workaday tools of much more limited potential. More so that new, revolutionary concepts in programming haven't received attention because programmers have become too narrow minded. And that is very simply fundamentally an untrue characterization of reality. Sure, let's look at concurrency, one of his examples. He bemoans the parallelization model of sequential programming with threads and locks as being excessively complex and inherently self-limited. And he's absolutely correct, it's a horrible method of parallelism. But it's not as though people aren't aware of that, or as though people haven't been actively developing alternate, highly innovative ways to tackle the problem every year since the 1970s. Look at Haskell, OCaml,vector computing, CUDA/GPU coding, or node.js. Or Scala, Erlang, or Rust, all three of which implement the touted revolutionary "actor model" that Victor brandishes. Or look at direct data manipulations as "programming". This hasn't been ignored, it's been actively worked on in every way imaginable. CASE programming received a lot of attention, and still does. Various workflow based programming models have received just as much attention. What about Flash? Hypercard? Etc. And there are many niche uses where direct data manipulation has proven to be highly useful. But again and again it's proven to be basically incompatible with general purpose programming, likely because of a fundamental impedance mismatch. A total of billions of dollars in investment has gone into these technologies, it's counterfactual to put forward the notion that we are blind to alternatives or that we haven't tried. Or look at his example of the smalltalk browser. How can any modern coder look at that and not laugh. Any modern IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio can present to the developer exactly that interface. Again and again it looks either like Victor is either blindly ignorant of the practice of programming in the real-world or he is simply adhering to the "no true Scottsman" fallacy. Imagining that the ideas he brings up haven't "truly" been tried, not seriously and honestly, they've just been toyed with and abandoned. Except that in some cases, such as the actor model, they have not just been tried they've been developed into robust solutions and they are made use of in industry when and if they are warranted. It's hilarious that we're even having this discussion on a forum written in Arc, of all things. To circle back to the particular examples I gave of alternative important advances in programming (focusing on development velocity and reliability), I find it amusing and ironic that some folks so easily dismiss these ideas because they are so seemingly mundane. But they are mundane in precisely the ways that structured programming was mundane when it was in its infancy. It was easy to write off structured programming as nothing more than clerical work preparatory to actual programming, but now we know that not to be true. It's also quite easy to write off testing and integration, as examples, as extraneous supporting work that falls outside "real programming". However, I believe that when the tooling of programming advances to more intimately embrace these things we'll see an unprecedented explosion in programming innovation and productivity, to a degree where people used to relying on such tools will look on our programming today as just as primitive as folks using pre-structured programming appear to us today. Certainly a lot of programmers today have their heads down, because they're concentrated on the work immediately in front of them. But the idea that programming as a whole is trapped inside some sort of "box" which it is incapable of contemplating the outside of is utterly wrong with numerous examples of substantial and fundamental innovation happening all the time. I think Victor is annoyed that the perfect ideal of those concepts he mentions haven't magically achieved reification without accumulating the necessary complexity and kruft that comes with translating abstract ideas into practical realities. And I think he's annoyed that fundamentally flawed and imperfect ideas, such as the x86 architecture, continue to survive and be immanently practical solutions decade after decade after decade. It turns out that the real world doesn't give a crap about our aesthetic sensibilities, sometimes the best solution isn't always elegant. To people who refuse to poke their head out of the elegance box the world will always seem as though it turned its back on perfection.