Bret Victor:

We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that‘s worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that‘s led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?

See also, his follow-up.

Bret Victor designs tools. Tools that help you see, or measure and analyze, what you’re working on while you’re working on them. I’ve mentioned him before.

This latest presentation by Victor describes a space that can help people who make things do the same things in the real world as Victor’s tools have helped people do in the digital one. Pretty interesting stuff.

Flowhub is “peer-to-peer full-stack visual programming for your fingers”.

In other words, you can build applications and services by tapping and dragging and pinching rather than by typing and typing and typing. Pretty cool stuff.

The idea of building applications using a workflow-based graph isn’t new. From Bret Victor’s “The Future of Programming” at this years DBX came a link to Sketchpad from 1963. However, bringing this idea into the modern age due to the ubiquity of touchscreen devices makes very good sense.

Henri Berguis, one of the authors of NoFlo, a Kickstarted project for building graph-based programming interfaces, writes on his blog about the launch of Flowhub:

The role of Flowhub as a service is analogous to what GitHub provides for traditional software development.

I’m very much looking forward to where this will lead. I look at my nieces and nephews and wonder whether or not I should teach them programming the way I learned it or simply give them a way to build stuff using this whole-new way of writing programs.

Bret Victor: The Future of Programming is a presentation he did for Dropbox’s DBX conference earlier in July. Victor goes back-in-time to 1973 to give his presentation on what the future of programming could be. A perfect illustration for all of us that work on computers to know that we simply have not figured everything out yet.

The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you’re doing. Because once you think you know what you’re doing you stop looking around for other ways of doing things. You stop being able to see other ways of doing things. You become blind.

Be sure to watch the entire presentation.

Bret Victor:

Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond with two thoughts about learning:

How could I possibly avoid linking to this?

See also: Inventing on Principle.

Chris Granger about Light Table:

Light Table is based on a very simple idea: we need a real work surface to code on, not just an editor and a project explorer. We need to be able to move things around, keep clutter down, and bring information to the foreground in the places we need it most.

This project is inspired by Bret Victor’s presentation Inventing on Principal that I also mentioned Nilai is inspired by. Light Table makes for a very interesting demo. The most intriguing of the modes shown was the mode wherein you could see all of the related code while you were editing, say, a specific method in a class. This type of IDE wouldn’t just save time, it’d probably result in far better code.