bigsassyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Introducing Swift”
Is this related to Bret Victor's stuff? My mind was blown when I saw this video 2 years ago, and I can't help but see similarities here: link to this video
0:00 / 0:00
#bretvictor#liveprogramming#immediatefeedback
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
Rui Oliveira
819 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 13 people: 12 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2025.
- Presented by Bret Victor, interface designer
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
338K views14 years ago13 recommendations
Software designTools and practiceSimplicity and complexityCreative coding
Bret Victor demonstrates live-programming tools and argues that creators need immediate feedback and a guiding principle.
Why it's here
13 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as an inspiring and classic talk on the importance of immediate feedback in programming and design tools.
Moments people linked to
productionQAon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Favorite talks [video] on software development?”
Probably not exactly what you need, but as far as inspiration is concerned, it doesn't get much better than this: link to this video Check out Bret Victor's talks in general (worrydream.com). He is quite interesting.
rpedenon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”
…othing but code. But watching this talk inspires me to go and try things like Node Red and Unreal Blueprints. In both cases, code is usually still involved, but they both offer a visual way of connecting components. I find it helpful to be able to visualize software this way so I can immediate understand how data flows through the application. 1 link to this video…
ignoramouson Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?”
Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is even better (albeit it isn't only a product pitch): link to this video
pedrovhbon Hacker News • Recommends
On “What I've learned about flow fields so far”
Nice! Playing around with the widget under the section "Experimenting with lines" I'm reminded of Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk 0 (an absolute must watch, if anyone hasn't yet). In particular, changing the smoothness reveals a sort of scaling effect that I'd probably never know about if not playing around with sliders and having it update in real time rather than setting individual values. Very interesting and beautiful! 0 link to this video
DanielRibeiroon Hacker News • Recommends
On “The Utopian UI Architect”
You may not consider him a genius. But Bret does have some pretty innovate ideas on Programming and Design (and more). Good examples: Inventing on Principle: link to this video The Humane Representation of Thought: link
bchon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Panic’s Next Editor”
Nice, but I think I can raise you. That talk mostly seemed pretty predictable (though I incorrectly guessed gfx via sixels0, not a(nother) terminal emulator). If your interest was piqued with that parent video though, prepare to have your mind blown with this1, who’s thesis maybe similar in the sense of “stop _just_ simply working”. Bernhardt seems to be saying don’t be afraid to take time and think deeply and “go deep”, while Victor is explicitly saying make it count by way of targeting with intention what’s important to you. A sort of “fight the good fight.” 0 link 1 link to this video
gervwykon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Are React-like UI frameworks a fad or a genuine step forward?”
Bringing two concepts closer, especially visually will result in a better developer experience - Thus merging html and js into a single file, component, class / object and sequential logic was really the turning point to build more complex web apps. This reminds me of the excellent talk by bret victor link to this video
fossuseron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Why isn’t visual programming a bigger thing?”
You’d probably like Bret Victor’s inventing on principle talk: link to this video He demonstrates some good examples. I’m not quite sure it’s what you mean by visual, but it seems obviously valuable and tools that enabled some of what he shows would be really useful. I’m not sure why we don’t have these things - I think Alan Kay would say it’s because we stopped doing real research to improve what our tools can be. We’re just relying on old paradigms (I just watched this earlier today: link )
bhntr3on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?”
In terms of mind-expanding or intellectually stimulating, I find it's easier to get that from Youtube. I recommend: 3blue1brown for math ( link ) Everyday Astronaut if you are casually interested in rockets ( link ) Bret Victor ( link to this video ) or Rich Hickey ( link ) for programming and design. Doing a full college course is such a time investment and it usually takes a few weeks to start proving the interesting stuff. I find it more fun to look to shorter content for inspiration. I might realize I don't understand the fundamentals of the topic and then seek out a way to study it.
ryanmentoron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: How do you generate higher-quality ideas?”
Time and Time and Space and Space are necessary for high quality creativity : link and working with solid principles, from first principles, is how you reach durable new understandings. IMO. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has some great material about the use of principles in being personally creative. Inventing on Principle: link to this video I serve as a creativity coach to builders, innovators, and founders. Sometimes what a thinker needs more than anything else is a BREAK to BATHE! and then... EUREKA! link
anon35on Hacker News • Recommends
On “MDN Playground”
…ll, "play". But really these kind of playgrounds are at least a cousin, if not a direct descendant, of the immediate feedback principle that underlies everything from a REPL to the kind of systems (Symbolics, etc) that allow you to edit running code. Their potential is beautifully illustrated in Brett Victor's famous 'Inventing on Principle' talk: link to this video Three areas that I'd love to see playgrounds mature beyond teaching beginners CSS: 1) Integrated directly into developer documentation. You can see some of that in systems that are documenting services -- for example, the Google Sheets API documentation has a 'Try this Method' box that lets you post a request to the service on the same page…
u/MdxBhmtin r/haskell • Mentions
Is this possible in Haskell?
http://vimeo.com/36579366 , @ min 16:40
link to this video <- youtube link so you can jump to 17:00
The whole talk is very inspiring, and it's close to the other ideas we saw here lately (visual haskell for an example).
Is there any development in that direction? I can only remember Yesod having problems to lessens the problems of code/compile/test iteration.
edit: As asked, a quick summaire of the idea:
He's basically having instant feedback of the changes he does to the code. He got a picture of a tree, a parameter for number of petals, he can change this and see how the picture update on real time.
Or when coding a function, you have the computer ouput iteraction…
u/Clementsparrowin r/ProgrammingLanguages • Mentions
On “Print statement debugging”
look at Brett Victor's ideas. For instance in this talk: link to this video
or in this article: https://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
joeblauon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Webflow (YC S13) Lets You Design Responsive Websites Visually, Publish Instantly”
I love the design and the concept of the site as well as others in this space like jetstrap, easel, and divshot. To be honest, I've tried a few of these offerings and as a web developer this is not what I want, I'm looking for two things: 1. An editor like the one Bret Victor talked about in his "Inventing on Principle" talk1. I want to edit HTML and CSS and see updates reflected in real time2. 2. A way to hook this into a DVCS (Or better yet, a desktop application/desktop plugin). My development workflow relies heavily on Git and I don't think I'm going to download a zip payload and extract it every time I need to do a commit. 1 - link to this video 2 - link