Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:

>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
>
> Can you give us a summary or synopsis?

It's not easy to summarize it. Many talks are little more than 
the slides they are based on, but this talk contains lot of 
graphics and animation, it's really a talk that you have to see 
if you want to appreciate its contents, because it's mostly about 
visual ideas.

It discusses about using visualization to help design code and 
program, and more. This talk is now famous, it was a start of a 
little "revolution". After that talk many developments have 
happened. Maybe even the future LightTable IDE was inspired a bit 
by it. I have seen Khan and his academy software follow some of 
the ideas contained in that talk to teach JavaScript, and then I 
have seen another talk explain similar ideas better, and then 
other people criticize it a lot.

In the end part of me likes those ideas, and part of me doesn't 
like it. To teach things like StarLogo are in my opinion better 
for newbie programmers, but that talk is not just about new 
programmers. Some of those ideas are cool.

I have never linked this talk or the successive developments in 
this newsgroup because it being good stuff to know for every 
programmer, it's not much related to D and the not-interactive 
style of programming it asks for.

Bye,
bearophile