[canadian_voter]

One guest, after spending time at Dynamicland, held up his smartphone and shouted, “This thing is a prison!”

Holy crap. This is really, really cool. Actual magic.

But most importantly — programs are real. You touch them. You see them everywhere — they can only run when visible. You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes.

I think I'm in love.

The computer of the future is not a product, but a place.

[westoncb]

Maybe I've missed something. I'm not sure what's magical about someone shouting that their smartphone is a prison.

Do you see yourself using this as an alternative to your current computer/phone? For the things I use computers for, it seems that Dynamicland would not be applicable, so I'm having a hard time understanding why some are finding this so exciting.

(Don't get me wrong, I think it looks neat, and the problem it's addressing is important—but it does not appear to be an actual general-purpose alternative computing platform. And I've seen/read most everything put out related to the project if I'm not mistaken. Feel free to suggest me new things if someone thinks it has general-purpose computing capabilities.)

[enjalot]

It is a general purpose computing platform, with lots of utilities for programming in a physical space. All of the surface area becomes a display, you can render using inches instead of pixels.

In it's early stage there are still many utilities and performance improvements it needs before it can replace your MacBook pro, but it is tangibly exciting to actually work collaboratively rather than stare at a screen at the same time as someone else is staring at a different screen.

The magic moment is in how different it feels to compute with your whole body in a social environment. It really does make a screen feel like a cage that has trapped your mind.

[whatshisface]

>before it can replace your MacBook pro

It will never replace my MacBook pro - I don't want to have to set up a board game every time I sit down in the park to work on something! It's a cool educational tool for young kids, but we're going to have to wean them off of fun tactile interfaces and on to text eventually. (The biggest problem with visual programming environments is that they force the programmer to solve large-scale graph problems in order to make their programs not look like a mess - this wouldn't be solved by escaping the screen.)

Hello, humans in 20 years when this comment is being used as a humorous example of what people thought in 2017. ;)

[vertex-four]

It'll never replace your Macbook Pro as a professional developer, but it might very well allow people to create new things with computers without having to be a professional developer. In this way, compare Dynamicland to Excel or Lego Mindstorms - except that it might be more, in the same way that Excel allows people to solve business problems they never could've before, and Mindstorms allows people to create machines they never could've before.

[infinite8s]

Is text really the end-all of human-computer interaction? Can you not imagine future programming involving teaching the computer what you want it to accomplish?

[juliendorra]

Teaching is hard. It involves good communication, breaking up what you want to convey in smaller parts, organizing these parts according to the model of the learner, checking that everything is understood by asking questions and doing it all again to correct the misunderstandings.

We can infer that having to teach a computer won’t be easier than straight on telling it what to do with a formal language and getting feedback. The hard part is designing the problem space.

Of course better, continuous feedback would greatly improve the ease of programming.

[mcphage]

> You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes.

From the reverse: if something happens, how can I tell which piece of paper somewhere in the room made that happen?

[UncleEntity]

> No black boxes.

Other than the ones hiding behind the projector in the ceiling you mean?

Kind of like the Wizard of Oz I suppose...

[jf]

One of the ideas I heard people at Dynamicland mention is to have Realtalk project highlights over the dependencies (this would be possible because Realktalk is self hosting, all the code that runs Realtalk is printed on paper)

In practice, when I wanted to see how something worked, I would just ask somebody in the room and get pointed to where the dependency was.

[canadianwriter]

Things like the Google home and Amazon echo are a step in that direction. Using the internet just by asking questions out loud are a novel way to interact with a computer. Can't wait to see where this goes.

[jasonkostempski]

Voice control is in the right direction but Home and Echo are in the wrong direction: "You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes."

[azeirah]

"Canadianwriter" responds to "canadian_voter", can't help but notice it :p