Rui Oliveira
12 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2013–2025
54:20 · 339K views · Feb 22, 2012
Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.
It is HN's go-to recommendation for the case that programming environments should give instant feedback, and it appears in nearly every thread on live coding, visual programming or developer tools.
20 comments from Hacker News
I think most here have already seen it, but I find that Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk[1] is one of the best I've seen. I re-watch it every so often to help prevent my thinking from falling into a rut. When developing software as a career, it's so easy to just fall into a pattern where you use the same tools and techniques over and over again. Watching this talk this talk inspires me to investigate alternate approaches to developing and delivering software. It's easy to think of software development as something that always need to involve code, and nothing but code. But watching this talk inspires me to go and try things like Node Red and Unreal Blueprints. In both cases, code is usually still involved, but they both offer a visual way of connecting components. I find it helpful to be able to visualize software this way so I can immediate understand how data flows through the application. [1] this video
Nice! Playing around with the widget under the section "Experimenting with lines" I'm reminded of Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk [0] (an absolute must watch, if anyone hasn't yet). In particular, changing the smoothness reveals a sort of scaling effect that I'd probably never know about if not playing around with sliders and having it update in real time rather than setting individual values. Very interesting and beautiful! [0] this video
Probably not exactly what you need, but as far as inspiration is concerned, it doesn't get much better than this: this video Check out Bret Victor's talks in general (worrydream.com). He is quite interesting.
Is this related to Bret Victor's stuff? My mind was blown when I saw this video 2 years ago, and I can't help but see similarities here: this video
Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is even better (albeit it isn't only a product pitch): this video