Joey Reid
12 HN recommenders · recommended in 19 months, 2017–2026
32:56 · 305K views · Jul 31, 2013
Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.
HN treats it as a classic, near-mandatory talk on how programming tools and paradigms stagnated and which older ideas deserve revival.
20 comments from Hacker News
Lots of cynic-cynics in here :) I'll stand up for the author. The lists in the article are not great, but I still agree with the sentiment. I recommend everyone watch Bret Victor's classic "The Future of Programming" this video Yes, we've had a trillion dollars invested in "How to run database servers at scale". And, we've had some incremental improvements to the C++ish language ecosystem. We've effectively replaced Perl with Python. That's nice. Deep Learning has been a major invention. Probably the most revolutionary I can think of in the past couple decades. But, what do I do in Visual Studio 2019 that is fundamentally different than what I was doing in Borland Turbo Pascal back on my old 286? C++20 is more powerful. Intellisense is nice. Edit-and-continue worked 20 years ago and most programmers still don't use it. If you are super awesome, you might use a reversible debugger. That's still fringe science these days. There is glacial momentum in the programming community. A lot of "grep and loose, flat ASCII files were good enough for my grandpappy. I can't accept anything different" And, so we don't have code-as-database. A lot of "I grew up learning how to parse curly bracket blocks. So, I can't accept anything different". So, so many languages try to look like C and are mostly flavors of the same procedural-OO-bit-of-functional paradigm. A lot of "GDB is terrible, don't even try" so many programmers are in reverse-stockholm system where they have convinced themselves debug
Bret Victor's, "The Future of Programming" is illuminating. He walks through what "programming" means and how the concept of "programming" has shifted in little evolutionary leaps. this video "There can be a lot of resistance to new ways of working that require you to unlearn what you've already learned and think in new ways. ... And there can even be outright hostility." Programming Baduk used to involve expert systems. Now convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can hoist a computer to superhuman performance, even doing so without pre-programmed rules (see MuZero). We no longer "program" computers to play Go, chess, shogi, or even Atari games. Some people have difficulty keeping code structures in their mind's eye. Here's a conceptual development environment for navigating code visually, ending with a dual text editor: [LINK] Is that programming? What's the difference between _typing_ instructions into a computer to place a graphical user interface widget on a screen and _telling_ the computer you'd like to put a toroid on the screen? Computers can use CNNs to fill in knowledge gaps. Even though the computer wasn't told the colour, size, shading, material, or location of the toroid, it can still show us the ring. Is telling a holodeck that you'd like to replay a scene from a novel a form of programming? [LINK] Each evolutionary step in programming has given us more powerful ways to express ideas in ever terser forms. Few people code in binary anymore. Did Picard need to tell the
'The future of Programming' by Bret Victor ( this video ). Seems a pun about OP title but it really is related with his/her question. Take a look and you will be amazed of how good (or revolutionary by our standards) some old technologies were.
If you haven't yet seen this video, please do: this video (Bret Victor The Future of Programming) This won't tell you who he is, exactly, but it does give insight into how he thinks. And it's a pretty great talk, in my opinion.
Bret Victor is amazing. I saw his video about the future of programming[0] and have been following him since then. [0] this video