itsyogeshon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”
Bret Victor is amazing. I saw his video about the future of programming0 and have been following him since then. 0 link to this video
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Bret Victor The Future of Programming
Joey Reid
665 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 14 people: 12 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 1 curated list.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2024.
- Presented by Bret Victor, computer scientist
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
304K views13 years ago14 recommendations
History and cultureSoftware designHistory of computingLanguage design and type systemsSoftware architecture
Bret Victor presents a talk from the perspective of a 1973 engineer to explore forgotten, revolutionary ideas in early computing history.
"The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you're doing." Presented at Dropbox's DBX conference on July 9, 2013. All of the slides are available at: worrydream.com/dbx/ For his recent DBX Conference talk, Victor took attendees back to the year 1973, donning the uniform of an IBM systems engineer of the times, delivering his presentation on an overhead projector. The '60s and early '70s were a fertile time for CS ideas, reminds Victor, but even more importantly, it was a time of unfettered thinking, unconstrained by programming dogma, authority, and tradition. 'The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing,' explains Victor. 'Because once you think you know what you're doing you stop looking around for other ways of doing things and you stop being able to see other ways of doing things. You become blind.' He concludes, 'I think you have to say: "We don't know what programming is. We don't know what computing is. We don't even know what a computer is." And once you truly understand that, and once you truly believe that, then you're free, and you can think anything.'"Why it's here
14 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as an eye-opening look at lost computing paradigms and a warning against accepting current programming dogmas as final.
diegojromeroon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: What is the future of programming?”
'The future of Programming' by Bret Victor ( link to 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.
corysamaon Hacker News • Recommends
On “The Great Software Stagnation”
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" link to 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 28…
thangalinon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why can't I write code inside my browser?”
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. link to 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…
ulkeshon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Bret Victor: Update July 2023”
If you haven't yet seen this video, please do: link to 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.
programming-talkscurated list on GitHubRecommends
Under “Software Development”
The Future of Programming 00:32:56 by **Bret Victor** (2013)
namuolon Hacker News • Recommends
On “You Can’t Do Data Science in a GUI”
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: link to this video
veli_jozaon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Programming Paradigms and Beyond [pdf]”
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 link to this video
DeBraidon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?”
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` link to this video
j-pbon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?””
…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: link to 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.…
f0e4c2f7on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Stack Overflow Architecture in the year 2070”
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 link to this video
yesenadamon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?”
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 link to this video The Humane Representation of Thought link Media for Thinking the Unthinkable link Seeing Spaces link Drawing Dynamic Visualizations link link
awonghon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Choose Boring Technology and LLMs”
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: link to 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.
u/PaulBonePlasmain r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions
On “Predict the state of Programming Languages in 2030”
…servers, more interactive tooling (like debuggers that allow users to track various values and see how they change (yes I use rr / permosco and also mdb)). I wonder also how much this can interact with programming environments such as Smalltalk.
That's enough from me, Now I want to share some predictions from the 1970s looking towards the 2000s, [video Great high resolution video from the 1970s don't you think?…
u/jnazarioin r/compsci • Mentions
On “Please help me find a computer history lecture”
Sounds like this one. Bret Victor at DBX a few years ago.
link to this video
Presented at Dropbox's DBX conference on July 9, 2013.
All of the slides are available at: http://worrydream.com/dbx/
> For his recent DBX Conference talk, Victor took attendees back to the year 1973, donning the uniform of an IBM systems engineer of the times, delivering his presentation on an overhead projector. The '60s and early '70s were a fertile time for CS ideas, reminds Victor, but even more importantly, it was a time of unfettered thinking, unconstrained by programming dogma, authority, and tradition. 'The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing,'…