[scott_weber]

Perhaps Bret Victor's ideas are comparable to something like formal methods: few doubt their enormous power, but the difficulty is in the extreme effort one needs to implement them in a project. It is tempting to believe that the level of instrumentation that Bret proposes could be achieved automatically, just as it was once dreamed that formal methods could be fully automatic. But experience with formal methods has shown us that while some of their promise can be implemented by automatic tools, and this is valuable, to realize their full potential for a complex project requires substantial effort, non-reusable effort.