I love Bret Victor and believe he has some very important things to say about design (UI design, language design and general design) but a lot of his concepts don't scale or abstract as well as he seems to be implying (ironic because he has a full essay on "The Ladder of Abstraction" [0]).

He makes some keen observations about how tooling in certain areas (especially front end design) is geared towards programmers rather than visual GUI tools, and tries to relate that back to a more general point about getting intuition for code, but I think this is only really applicable when there is a visual metaphor for the concept that there is an intuition to be gotten about.

To that end, rather than "programming not having progressed", a better realisation of his goals would be better documentation, interactive explainers, more tooling for editing/developing/profiling for whatever use case you need it for and not, as he would be implying, that all languages are naively missing out on the obvious future of all programming (which I don't think is an unfair inference from the featured video where he's presenting all programming like it's still the 1970s).

He does put his money where his mouth is, creating interactive essays and explainers that put his preaching into practice [1] which again are very good for those specific concepts but don't abstract to all education.

Similarly he has Dynamicland [2] which aims to be an educational hacker space type place to explore other means of programming, input etc. It's a _fascinating_ experiment and there are plenty of interesting takeaways, but it still doesn't convince me that the concepts he's espousing are the future of programming. A much better way to teach kids how computers work and how to instruct them? Sure. Am I going to be writing apps using bits of paper in 2050? Probably not.

An interesting point of comparison would be the Ken Iverson "notation as a tool of thought" which also tries to tackle the notion of programming being cumbersome and unintuitive, but comes at it very much from the mathematical, problem solving angle rather than the visual design angle. [3]

[0] https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

[1] https://worrydream.com/KillMath/

[2] https://dynamicland.org/

[3] https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

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.