[cloudmike]

The most remarkable thing about "Bret Victor's vision" is how different people have interpreted what his vision even is. His ideas are multi-faceted, so they inspire in several important directions all at once, e.g.:

- "what if" feedback loops (crudely, "live programming")

- direct manipulation (an old idea but beautifully captured in his projects)

- making logic feel more geometric / concrete

- visualizing and manipulating data, especially over time

- humane interfaces (putting "computing" into the world around us, but without AR)

- etc.

Bret Victor is very much Alan Kay's protege and has unfortunately inherited the curse of people cherry-picking particular ideas and missing the bigger picture.

So as others have pointed out, the only person who may be fully attempting Bret Victor's vision is Bret Victor with Dynamicland. You may also be curious to check out Humane [1] which is a hardware startup founded by ex-Apple people. They're rumored to be shipping a projection-based wearable device this year. This device could potentially be a platform for people to experiment more in the direction of Bret Victor's vision.

[1] http://hu.ma.ne

[gunnihinn]

> Bret Victor is very much Alan Kay's protege and has unfortunately inherited the curse of people cherry-picking particular ideas and missing the bigger picture.

Maybe it's time we lay some of the blame for us idiots just not getting Alan Kay's ideas on Alan Kay. At this point he only has himself to blame if he's spent 50 years trying and failing to communicate his wonderful ideas.

[pavlov]

Honest question: who in this field has a better track record of their visionary ideas leading to real-world implementations than Alan Kay?

Not everything ended up being adopted in the form he envisioned or with the semantics he proposed, but there have been a lot of right calls and influential designs in his 50+ year career.

[davidy123]

Douglas Engelbart. Tim Berners-Lee. Smalltalk is pretty cool, though.

[pavlov]

What kind of impact did Engelbart have after "the mother of all demos"? Much more limited than Kay, IMO. Kay’s Dynabook is arguably just as important, and he went on to do a lot of other stuff.

Same for Berners-Lee. Sure, he remains influential over the web's incremental progress on W3C, but anything more visionary seems to be a miss: XHTML, semantic web, the Solid project...

[liveoneggs]

The mother of all demos is the world we live in now. He demonstrated a working model of 30 years into the future. It's like someone walking on stage and showing you what life will be in 2050.

Engelbart invented the mouse and the entire idea of pointing at things on the screen to interact with them. The results of that interaction is now what you call "the web" (hypertext).

[davidy123]

Englebart also substantially inspired Kay, but each of these people would probably have not had success without the network of ispirations. In fact I think we should talk about it like this; Bush->Englebart->Kay->Berners-Lee (superficially) rather than the individual on their own. It's also interesting that none of these people were at the head of big successful companies, though not surprising since that basically involves a lot of compromises.

[pas]

I think his experiment with DSLs (VPRI STEPS project) is very insightful, I always herpderp about how we need better tools to in situ express "the domain", but of course reality has a very strong bias for keeping apparent complexity down, keeping cognitive friction between components minimal, leaky abstractions are bad so encapsulation has to be total, so it's extra hard as an afterthought (hence ORMs and middlewares tend to be very clunky), etc.

Though there are a few examples of moving in the right (?) direction, for example styled components (for React, which moves CSS into JS/TS code, there's a VScode plugin for it, and thanks to the tagged templates they can be validated).

[m_mueller]

I remember seeing a demo where A.K. used an experimental OS made with ~1k LOC using STEPS approach to actually run his slides. Never found the link to it again (if someone has it I'd appreciate), but even more importantly, I'd love to know what happened with that OS. It would seem like a great research OS going forward if it really had GUI, networking and FS expressed with such low amount of user code. It also seems to me the project coming closest to Engelbart's vision (as their NLS also did everything just by meta-programming to an assembler with increasingly high levels of abstraction).

[morphle]

Alan Kay addresses Qualcomm https://vimeo.com/82301919

[m_mueller]

Thank you! Is he actually running their own OS here, or is it just a scripted slide application? What I saw was more of a smaller talk given to students if I remember correctly, where he goes into the technical details of his setup a bit.

[morphle]

I am one of three people who have this code running live. It is way more amazing than you think, it is not scripted at all. Its a full OS/GUI personal computer in 20 KLOC, no external libraries. The graphics for example are just 435 lines of code (versus millions for Cairo).

[jecel]

The OS (in 20K lines of code) is called "Frank" and in the talks where Alan uses it for his slides at one point he zooms out and you can see a cartoon Frankenstein monster in the top left corner.

You might find this list of Kay's talks interesting:

https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

[morphle]

Please see the comments on this Morphle HN account for those Alan Kay talks or mail morphle &at& ziggo &dot& nl for all those Alan Kay links student lectures you remember.

[Ygg2]

Alan Kay is the Tesla of programming. Beautiful design, genius implementation but utterly impractical in 90% cases.

[1123581321]

He hasn't failed at all. What are you talking about? Dozens of programming languages are more sensible and ergonomic because of his influence.

[Zhyl]

I agree with this. It's hard to nail down why Victor's talks are so compelling, when each of these items separately are much more mundane but are still quite well explored areas.

* "What if" feedback loops/direct manipulation

Victor's vision abstractly seems to be trying to predict/explore the consequence of some action in programming, and in specific demonstration seems to be using small widgets to allow easy manipulation of inputs to get an intuitive understanding of outputs. This could be boiled down to different goals: "Allow a program to be more easily tweaked" and "Explore a concept to get intuition of a different viewpoint". The more cynical/pragmatic interpretations for these are "make a GUI for your program" and "use interactive demos when teaching certain topics".

The first interpretation is almost comical, but we can maybe expand this to be "when you make a GUI, think about how your interface is being interpreted intuitively and this can help make your app more usable". This can maybe understood more easily when taken with the fact that Bret Victor helped design the interface for the first iPhone - famously intuitive to use. This also leads to its limitations - only concepts that have another more intuitive viewpoint can be represented. I can add a colour wheel to my WYSIWYG editor rather than hex values, but I can't easily create a GUI that lets me express that I want to validate, strip the whitespace from an email address and put it into lowercase.

The second interpretation leads to explorable explanations, which Victor has made a few of himself [0,1], but I would also cite Nicki Case [2] and unconed [3] as being other good examples. Again, this is only afforded to specific topics that have scope for exploration.

* Making logic feel more geometric/concrete

This can be seen in things like Labview (made in 1986), Apache NiFi (made in 2006) among others, e.g. SAS. In a sense, this has existed in the form of UNIX pipelines and functional programming since the first LISP was made. There is a further point which is "there currently aren't tools like this that are suitable for a non-programming audience", which is what 'Low Code' and 'No Code' is trying to achieve, but unfortunately in practice as soon as you hit a limitation of the framework then you're back to needing an engineer again.

* Human Interfaces

Sort of addressed in 'feedback loops' point above, but the DynamicLand is an interesting demo of what he's trying to get to. I think this speaks more to me with internet of things. I have friends who have set up full smart-home heating systems and can move music between rooms which are all very much seen the same as adjusting a physical thermostat rather than 'programming' or similar.

There is definitely a lot that can be explored here for certain applications, but there probably isn't direct utility in arranging pieces of paper with coloured dots on it in order to set the path of a robot. I can see this in a more consulting/capture sense of presenting certain input parameters in a more physical format, but again this is deviating from the OP's notion that this is a whole programming environment.

[0] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

[1] http://worrydream.com/KillMath/

[2] https://ncase.me

[3] https://acko.net