5 ms·

Great presentation as usual. One fundamental tension I see in much of the work he does is between purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments. T

Great presentation as usual. One fundamental tension I see in much of the work he does is between purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments. The challenge in both the maker space as well as much of the visual learning and programming material he has done previously is that each of them is incredibly time consuming to adapt to each new different project. In the real world even similar tasks within projects in the same domain often have enough subtle differences that re-use is not possible or very costly. That isn't to say these are insurmountable but maybe much of the focus needs to be on meta-tooling that can accelerate the work of experts to build these purpose-built environments (as opposed to making generic tooling). Inspiring stuff.

3JPLW 12y ago
> purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments That seemed to me to be a big unresolved tension in his comparison between command centers and physical workshops. Command centers still just have lots of general use multi-purpose workstations. TV stations do much better on this point, interestingly. While they all allow for seeing, I wonder what kinds of improvements we could have with purpose-built HID.
DalekBaldwin 12y ago
Especially for programming, the tools have to be narrowly tailored to the examples since you're constantly wrestling with the specter of Turing-completeness. Any given program is an instance of an infinite number of more general classes of programs, and it's the tool designer's job to choose which dimensions of the design space are meaningful and important enough to be worth simultaneously visualizing the consequences of possible alternatives. I think it's going to take some very judicious integration of recent work on modularity-enhancing programming paradigms into the design of reflective language implementations before it becomes tractable to build responsive special-purpose reflective tools on top of a generic infrastructure. Or at least that's the strategy I'm trying.
- ilovecomputers 12y ago
  That strategy lead to quite the run-on sentence. You have much work ahead of you friend from that appearance alone.
  - DalekBaldwin 12y ago
    Agreed, I've been thinking too much in code, not enough in English.

3JPLW 12y ago

> purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments That seemed to me to be a big unresolved tension in his comparison between command centers and physical workshops. Command centers still just have lots of general use multi-purpose workstations. TV stations do much better on this point, interestingly. While they all allow for seeing, I wonder what kinds of improvements we could have with purpose-built HID.

DalekBaldwin 12y ago

Especially for programming, the tools have to be narrowly tailored to the examples since you're constantly wrestling with the specter of Turing-completeness. Any given program is an instance of an infinite number of more general classes of programs, and it's the tool designer's job to choose which dimensions of the design space are meaningful and important enough to be worth simultaneously visualizing the consequences of possible alternatives. I think it's going to take some very judicious integration of recent work on modularity-enhancing programming paradigms into the design of reflective language implementations before it becomes tractable to build responsive special-purpose reflective tools on top of a generic infrastructure. Or at least that's the strategy I'm trying.

ilovecomputers 12y ago
That strategy lead to quite the run-on sentence. You have much work ahead of you friend from that appearance alone.
- DalekBaldwin 12y ago
  Agreed, I've been thinking too much in code, not enough in English.