Colin McDonnell
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2017–2024
15:12 · 21K views · Jun 17, 2015
Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.
Listed alongside his other talks as foundational context for Dynamicland and visual-programming ideas, and he is the most frequently cited speaker on such threads.
6 comments from Hacker News
Highly recommend Bret's 2 talks for context: [1] Seeing Spaces: this video [2] Humane Representation of Thought: [LINK]
For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When "What are your favourite tech talks of all time?" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle [LINK] The Future of Programming [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [LINK] Seeing Spaces this video Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [LINK] [LINK]
on one level, yes on another, they're down right scary and overwhelming, or at least dumbfounding and perplexing ..thinking specifically about The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] I had to stop it half way through.. :-/ see also Seeing Spaces this video and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [LINK]
It's going to be entirely different I feel. Instead of manipulating graphics on a flat screen, focus will probably be on manipulating physical objects on a table / in a room. Watch his 2 talks that highlight the thinking and inspiration behind the RealTalk project: this video [LINK]
Mm. I've been wondering recently why is it that Programmers don't have more specialized tools (Which incidentally reminds me of this lecture: [Bret Victor -- Seeing Spaces] this video ). It's interesting to think that high-performance traders have an entire market dedicated to specialized computer interfaces, terminals, etc. all focused on improving their productivity and ability to reason about the stock exchange. [LINK] As the top poster says about the Bloomberg terminals: ""1. You have to have a Bloomberg keyboard to work in finance. It's not even a question. It's a COGS for anybody who wants to work in finance or trading.""