I've dabbled a lot in this space as well- built an experimental language that natively supported live-coding, after building live coding capabilities through LSP for love2d (Lua) to get a feel for the feature set I wanted etc

Love2D Demo https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/livelove

Language Demo https://gist.github.com/jasonjmcghee/09b274bf2211845c551d435...

Me too, for my master thesis:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZipJOan54&t=1249s

It was a language designed alongside its IDE (which was a fairly rudimentary web app).

I've come around to feeling that if I'm going to make an experimental development tool, I need to make it in service of building something specific. Maybe something playful... if I'm building something "important" then it can put unwanted conservative pressure on the tool. But something, and if I do that then at least I have something interesting regardless of the fate of the development tool. Because yeah, there's a good chance no one else is going to be excited about the tool, so I have to build for my own sense of excitement, be my own most enthusiastic user.

There was recently an HN post with a video of someone using a pretty cool environment that supported that kind of live-coding for creating an electronic music track -- it seemed very appropriate there, and I would guess likely to be popular.

I think your time might be now.

One major issue with vibe coding is parsing divergent code paths, when different prompts create different solutions and architectural compromises.

Parsing that mess is a major headache, but with live coding and time travel,I bet those tools would make managing divergent code branches easier and really take advantage of branching repositories with multiple agents all working in tandem.

This is excellent: thank you for pursuing these wonderful ideas.

Seems to me the big failure was sticking with the Von Neuman architecture. Perhaps that was a forcing function towards where we’ve ended up.

There is no better time than now to try something brash and perpendicular to the mainstream.

yea i tried to do this (somewhat successfully) with a custom editor for css https://github.com/feralsoft/charisma (demos on my old x https://x.com/charisma_css)

css is primed for this since you can write your rules in such a way that rule order doesn't matter, which means you really don't have to think about where your code it

in my dream world, i have very smart search (probably llms will help), i look at just the minimal amount of code (ideally on a canvas), edit it and remove it from my context

i don't care where or how the code is stored, let the editor figure it out and just give me really good search and debuggers

You might like https://cs.brown.edu/~spr/codebubbles/

I wonder what LLMs say about us when they talk to each other.

"They're made out of meat" maybe. https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

He's actually more well known for the talks he's given and demos he's created since then. Here are a few:

• Inventing on Principle (https://vimeo.com/906418692) / (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591298)

• Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction (https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/)

• Learnable Programming (https://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/) / (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577133)

• Media for Thinking the Unthinkable (https://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/)

Or you could just check his website: https://worrydream.com/

He was already inspirational before that; check out Magic Ink. Because Apple won't let him share his work for that period, he isn't known for it; it's sort of like a gap in the geological record.

> Call me grumpy and sleep deprived, but every year I look at this talk again, and every year I wonder... "now, what" ? What am I supposed to do, as a programmer, to change this sad state of things ?

That depends on your goals. If you are into building systems for selling them (or production), then you are bound by the business model (platform vs library) and use cases (to make money). Otherwise, you are more limited in time.

To think more realistically about reality you have to work with, take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cum5uN2634o about types of (software) systems (decay), then decide what you would like to simplify and what you are willing to invest. If you want to properly fix stuff, unfortunately often you have to first properly (formally) specify the current system(s) (design space) to use it as (test,etc) reference for (partial) replacement/improvement/extension system(s).

What these type of lectures usually skip over (as the essentials) are the involved complexity, solution trade-offs and interoperability for meaningful use cases with current hw/sw/tools.

You could start a new project or contribute to an existing one. You could try out other people's projects and write about what you learned. You could write about what you learned from your own projects. You could give a talk that starts with a killer demo. You could try to find work that improves the situation, however slightly, instead of worsening it. You could sharpen your skills so that when you have more spare time you can make faster progress.

wow i was really primed to hate this article and this take because i, for lack of better terminology, genuinely view Bret Victor as an idol of mine. but i guess that is the thing with idolatry… to be clear to anyone who doesn’t care to read the article (understandable): there’s nothing untoward or unseemly, just a research group that is clearly lost, and Bret as BFDL not being able to “save” it. i will say that the other researchers come off as being pretty soft and useless, but that obviously does reflect back on the group’s raison d’etre and thus, by extension, its leader. like, imagine being recruited to a research group by Bret fucking Victor and being like “nah, i don’t want to work on anything useful, and if i can’t do exactly what i want to do, i quit”. i say this all, despite appearances, with the utmost respect for all those principals, who i have stalked on github, X, etc. to an unreasonable degree out of a pure, assuredly naïve desire to get more bits from people who i consider to be doing the so-called “Lord’s Work”… the people they brought on absolutely are legit enough to have earned the right to not genuflect to anyone, but… where’s all the idealistic belief in building something better for tomorrow that they all portend to care about, from their own words? i don’t want to get political, and won’t, but… it feels like the most self-centered take on idealism since… aw shucks, yesterday… it’s my fault for putting these incredibly brilliant people on a pedestal, but i still find the whole thing incredibly disappointing, as someone who, well… idolizes them. and i would rather be disappointed than chastened and cynical— the world has PLENTY of that to go around, and i still believe in the power of the intellect to transcend this kind of bullshit, this case notwithstanding.

A cult is usually what it takes to turn impractical ideas into practical ones. This link is great, thanks!

Ideas that scale don't scale until they do. The Macintosh didn't come out until people had been using WIMP GUIs for 10 years. People tried to build flying machines for centuries before the Wright Brothers figured out how to control one.

The solution to seeing more Bret Victor-ish tooling is for people to rediscover how to build the kind of apps that were commonplace on the desktop but which have become a very rare art in the cloud era.

Direct manipulation of objects in a shared workspace, instant undo/redo, trivial batch editing, easy duplication and backup, ... all things you can't do with your average SaaS and which most developers would revolt for if they'd had to do their own work without them.

I envy you sooo muuchh

When two humans want to talk but don't speak a shared language, if they spend enough time together, they will figure out how to communicate eventually.

But when two computers want to talk to each other and don't speak a "shared language" (aka, the client specifically must conform to the server's "language"—it's very one-sided in that sense) then no amount of time will allow them to learn one another's rules or settle on a shared communication contact without a human programmer getting involved.

He's around! You can see his current work at https://worrydream.com. He's mostly been working on Dynamicland (https://dynamicland.org). He'll also occasionally post on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/worrydream.com)

Doing this kind of stuff,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wa3nm0qcfM

https://worrydream.com

Agreed, but: I know a couple of players in the "Enterprise Low-Code" space, who have invested heavily in deeply integrated development environments (with a capital I) and the right abstractions. They are all struggling with AI adoption as their systems "don't speak text". LLMs are great at grokking text based programming but not much else.