Bret Victor The Future of Programming

If you haven't yet seen this video, please do: ▶ this video (Bret Victor The Future of Programming) This won't tell you who he is, exactly, but it does give insight into how he thinks. And it's a pretty great talk, in my opinion.

Lots of cynic-cynics in here :) I'll stand up for the author. The lists in the article are not great, but I still agree with the sentiment. I recommend everyone watch Bret Victor's classic "The Future of Programming" ▶ this video Yes, we've had a trillion dollars invested in "How to run database servers at scale". And, we've had some incremental improvements to the C++ish language ecosystem. We've effectively replaced Perl with Python. That's nice. Deep Learning has been a major invention. Probably the most revolutionary I can think of in the past couple decades. But, what do I do in Visual Studio 2019 that is fundamentally different than what I was doing in Borland Turbo Pascal back on my old 286? C++20 is more powerful. Intellisense is nice. Edit-and-continue worked 20 years ago and most programmers still don't use it. If you are super awesome, you might use a reversible debugger. That's still fringe science these days. There is glacial momentum in the programming community. A lot of "grep and loose, flat ASCII files were good enough for my grandpappy. I can't accept anything different" And, so we don't have code-as-database. A lot of "I grew up learning how to parse curly bracket blocks. So, I can't accept anything different". So, so many languages try to look like C and are mostly flavors of the same procedural-OO-bit-of-functional paradigm. A lot of "GDB is terrible, don't even try" so many programmers are in reverse-stockholm system where they have convinced themselves debug

Bret Victor's, "The Future of Programming" is illuminating. He walks through what "programming" means and how the concept of "programming" has shifted in little evolutionary leaps. ▶ this video "There can be a lot of resistance to new ways of working that require you to unlearn what you've already learned and think in new ways. ... And there can even be outright hostility." Programming Baduk used to involve expert systems. Now convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can hoist a computer to superhuman performance, even doing so without pre-programmed rules (see MuZero). We no longer "program" computers to play Go, chess, shogi, or even Atari games. Some people have difficulty keeping code structures in their mind's eye. Here's a conceptual development environment for navigating code visually, ending with a dual text editor: link Is that programming? What's the difference between _typing_ instructions into a computer to place a graphical user interface widget on a screen and _telling_ the computer you'd like to put a toroid on the screen? Computers can use CNNs to fill in knowledge gaps. Even though the computer wasn't told the colour, size, shading, material, or location of the toroid, it can still show us the ring. Is telling a holodeck that you'd like to replay a scene from a novel a form of programming? link Each evolutionary step in programming has given us more powerful ways to express ideas in ever terser forms. Few people code in binary anymore. Did Picard need to tell the

'The future of Programming' by Bret Victor ( ▶ this video ). Seems a pun about OP title but it really is related with his/her question. Take a look and you will be amazed of how good (or revolutionary by our standards) some old technologies were.

Bret Victor is amazing. I saw his video about the future of programming[0] and have been following him since then. [0] ▶ this video

I was more thinking about the blocked progress of true innovation in the way programming languages are made and used. This is the talk I referenced above: ▶ this video I agree with his main thesis which is that we can do better to improve on some of these literally 60 year old programming and programming tooling paradigms. I'm hoping that the paradigm improvement isn't to just paste over the entire endeavour with some AI agents that abstract away coding as we currently think about it.

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 ▶ this video The Humane Representation of Thought link Media for Thinking the Unthinkable link Seeing Spaces link Drawing Dynamic Visualizations link link

I think you might be ok on compute but bottleneck on bandwidth. Who knows though. Fun question. If you like exploring these kinds of ideas you might enjoy ▶ this video

PeerJ has actually quite a few publications, one of them is CS ;) link the dropdown on the top left allows you to switch between them. I think MathJax is certainly a step in the right direction, they even support rendering to MathML. But I agree that there is a certain lack there in terms of full semantic representations. MathJax is more accessible than TeX but it's still describing visual layout, instead of semantic meaning. Pushing HTML to arxiv is also a step into the right direction. I think the most important thing we can do is not be complacent with the state of the art. We need to go back to an age of computing where we didn't think we had it all figured out. We need to experiment, and not be afraid to take a step back in some aspects, like layout and kerning, in exchange for other advances like semantic representations and knowledge representation. I think bred victor has a great talk on this: ▶ this video I think we need to experiment with things like observablehq.com or nextjournal.com or the many other that are coming into existence.

Related thread: `Ask HN: What's the best book on the early history of the Internet and/or Web?` link My previous reco: Not a book, but a great video via Steve Blank: link Also `Bret Victor The Future of Programming`, which is misleading as above is performance piece where title slide reads `1973` ▶ this video

Good read. I feel the title should be "Teaching Programming Paradigms and Beyond" since the text assumes familiarity with complete CS landscape and comments on success of several teaching methods. I would recommend (also misleadingly titled) talk The Future of Programming by Bret Victor [1] which goes over some groundbreaking paradigms that have since become mostly forgotten. [1] ▶ this video

Yes, healthy skepticism is good, but just because code (i.e. text files) is often the most _powerful_ or _flexible_ tool, doesn't mean it's always the best tool. We (programmers) are notoriously bad at advancing the tools in our field. For a brief history of this, watch "The Future of Programming" talk by Bret Victor: ▶ this video