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The Future of Programming

2013-09-08
  • Bret Victor
    • 2013-07-09
    • People are change averse: people who programmed in binary didn’t care about assembler like Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program (von Neumann reputedly disciplined a student who wasted precious computer time writing in assembler)
    • Code -> direct manipulation
      • Sketchpad (1962)
        • bridge tensions based on a drawing and a small number of constraints
      • Directly manipulate data structures
    • Procedures -> goals and constraints
      • Examples: Planner (1969), Prolog (1972)
      • Pattern matching: SNOBOL (1962), Regexes (1967)
      • How do two networked computers communicate if they don’t already know how?
        • Having human programmers write APIs is very brittle (doesn’t scale well as the number of services increase, doesn’t scale well as protocols change)
    • Textual code -> spatial representation of information
      • Examples: NLS (1968), Grail (1968), Smalltalk Browser
      • Interactive / Immediate responses
    • Sequential -> Concurrrent
      • Sequential model makes sense when only one processor.
      • Threads and locks are kind of a dead-end, if we’re still using them in 40 years we should pack up and go home
      • the Actor Model (1973)