Victor, B. (2013) The Future of Programming. Presented at Dropbox’s DBX conference. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/71278954
Victor, B. (2013) A few words on Doug Englebart. Retrieved from http://worrydream.com/Engelbart/
2013:
"Technology changes quickly." -> "Moore's Law"
"People change slowly." Going from binary to assembly code (SOAP). Clerical work for people. * SOAP to Fortran
The idea that a real programmer does...
Four big ideas. The work is broken into four sections.
~6:30
1962 sketchpad
(overhead issue may fade)
~9:50
1969 Planner
IF WE KNOW
P implies Q (p->q)
FORWARD CHAINING
When assert P -> assert Q
BACKWARDS CHAINING
When goal Q -> goal P
1972 Prolog
When goal Q
try goal Pi and ... and goal Pn
1962 Snobol
1967 Regular Expressions
"How do you get communications started amoung totally uncorrelated..."
(standards, negotiations, )
API application programming interfaces
limited exposed stuff, changes, brittle
~16:30
1968 NLS (Mother of all demos?)
1968 Grail
symbol and handwritting recognition
1972 Smalltalk Browser
Visual collection based programming. -> spatially
1972 Plato
Immediate Response -> real time
importance of no delay/latency
~22:00?
Massively Parallel
Von Neumann Bottleneck
CPU <-> Memory
Most of the memory is idle, most of the time.
1971 Semi-conductor integrated circuit - microprocessor
Massively Parallel Processor Array. And it scales! (kind of)
Today Threads and Locks. Fighting for resources Dead end * Does not scale
1973 Actor Model
distributed
dogma:
"a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dogma
Programming was a new concept to the programmers of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them were advanturous with it and explorered new and strange ways of giving a computer instructions.
Did he use the projector on purpose for effect?
Bret Victor's main message is to not give up on the creativity of coming up with ways of telling a computer what it compute.