Bret Victor talks

Very rough notes on Bret Victor talks that I may write up some day.

Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

“Thoughts we cannot think”: amazing idea

• more general idea than Sapir-Whorf?

• tools in general shape thought

• language is just one tool

• 13:44 Jerome Bruner Interactive/Visual/Symbolic is nice

• See also Bidirectional Programming

Inventing on Principle

• I agree with following a principle

• I’m not sure I agree with making it a moral issue

• I agree with the idea of tightening feedback loops

• reminds me of constraint-based graphic design

• I’m impressed by the demo but extremely skeptical about how well it generalises

• can you really do everything you might want to do by having familiarity with only a small number of concepts and techniques?

• 36:00:

  • We need to be able to see the behaviour of the system … be able to adjust the system and see the response”
  • “We need multiple representations of the system”

Future of Programming

• He’s faked up an overhead projector! (And dressed as if he’s from the 60s)

Seeing spaces

A large part of it is communication: making sure everyone is on the same page

worrydream.com Climate Change

This one is amazing and I’m totally on board with that