A DEVELOPER WALKED ON STAGE DRESSED AS A 1973 ENGINEER AND "PREDICTED" THE FUTURE OF PROGRAMMING. THE TWIST: EVERYTHING HE DESCRIBED WAS ALREADY INVENTED 40 YEARS EARLIER AND WE STILL REFUSE TO USE IT. 32 minutes from Bret Victor, doing the most quietly savage talk on our entire industry.... -> The idea that lands: we write code as step-by-step text instructions and call that "Just how programming is". He shows four better ways -- all discovered in the 60s and 70s, all abandoned. Manipulate the data directly instead of typing blind code. Tell the machine your goal instead of every tiny step. We saw all this, then walked away. Why? The moment you're sure you know what programming is, you stop seeing anything better. That certainty is the cage. And now AI is dragging us back to exactly what he begged for -- you describe the goal in plain words, the machine works out the how. The future he mourned is arriving anyway. You thought text files were just how code works. This is the talk that shows it was a choice, and maybe the wrong one. Watch this one. It'll ruin how you see your job ↓show more

He should’ve worn a short sleeve button up shirt to really sell it.

On YouTube:

The bit where we act shocked by 50 year old ideas packaged as inonvation never gets old. Almost like the industry runs on amnesia by design

Genius. We think we are always so smart, but we know that people in the past were not. So this a genius way to show that we are still not that smart. Excelent take!

He is not a programmer, he is a UX designer whom I respect as that. His idea revolutionized in the 90s to visual programming and wysiwyg. But matters mental model not what users see. So it’s failed dead end or not solved properly.

So fake. This is not history. Very sloppy use of some random facts with wishful thinking then shaming ‘future’ developers.

The real lesson is that programming did not have to become walls of text, we just normalized the interface that won

This was also expressed in the days of "data driven" programming and "object oriented" programming. It was incorporated in a language named Prolog and several others in the past.

lol when he started talking about API’s

"Tell the machine your goal instead of every tiny step." This is also the current paradigm shift in biology (agency all the way down—cf @drmichaellevin) and what it implies for medicine: human-whispering—tell the body your goal instead of molecular micro-managing.

For those of you that remember the Shlaer-Mellor method...

crazy how some of the "future of coding" was already figured out before the internet even existed

yea the trap of early vonnuman arcitecture still in use today , lead to the single sequential thread of each core on multi core cpus , and the bit he missed , the bottelneck of memory bandwith over cpu access , the ditching of pipline proccessors used on some higher end mainframes in favor of simpler cpus a pipleine cpu for example one with say 8 stages , could do a log(cos(squre(a*b)/c))*sin(b*c)) as a single instruction , just data in and data out of the pipline , passing the intermediate values though the pipe without having to store or recall them individualy , ther just passed on to the next stage , saving quite a few memory read writes ( even at L1 chache ) , so rather than having say a 48core cpu , a single core with a programable 48 core recofigurable pipeline would have a significant performance advantage , but like he did say how to program it would be somthing that would not realy allow the use of legacy code or coding methods on half hybrid not fully fpga but partial confugurable pipline sub proccessors , passing data to the next after it did its little bit , on silicone where its timing is local to its core , as the distance accross the silicone adds a delay time , one that still affects the l1 cache read times , let alone actual system memory ,, theres a lot of room for improvment using primeraly ideas that where used in the 60's/70's that seemed to have been long forgoten in the name of refusal to learn and adopt new methods of programming , quite a valid talk

he actually predicted the future

👀 Too many mistakes, most likely intentional for comic effect, but I must admit, it is amusing. 🤭

Bret Victor is a legend, this talk hurts

There’s a lot of room for improvement for imperative programming already

@andreasxirtus

It is a continuous observation. AI idea has been there since 50's. So these observations are not shocking at all.

>quietly >lands AI slop

bret victor is unhinged in the best way, every talk hits different

@0xKruger

thx for sharing old gold stuff, saved this

Actually far better than death by PowerPoint

Yesterday's tomorrows. Brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

I was there in 1973 and the ties were twice as wide and half as long as this guy’s

Brilliant

@grok Hey Grok, Is the video in this tweet available on youtube?

Thanks for sharing!!!

he was some Erlang preacher, wasn't he?

Such a thoughtful pace throughout this conversation

😭