HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Is there some pet peeve you have about the world, which you wish to change? If there is, and you can put your finger on it, making it happen could be a very fulfilling thing to do.

I just figured out my pet peeve, the design principle I wish to impart to the world... after watching this video recommended in a different thread

Bret Victor Inventing on Principle -- https://youtu.be/8QiPFmIMxFc

I wish you luck if you find yours.

Rich Hickey - Hammock-driven development: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

Brett Victor - Inventing on principle: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc

Programming is terrible: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=csyL9EC0S0c

Dave Beazely - Python concurrency from the ground up (applicable to languages in general, with generator and corourine functionality) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4

Functional programming, with birds: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6BnVo7EHO_8&t=1009s

Short and classic: Wat https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

⬐ mikewarot

>Brett Victor - Inventing on principle: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc

This gave me a sharp moment of clarity, thank you so much for this!

I'll work on the wording over time, but here's a rough sketch of my principle:

My principle is that no person should ever be forced to blindly trust a computer to do the right thing. Computing shouldn't be either blindly trust the black box, or get nothing done.

Nobody should have to hand over their wallet to buy an ice cream cone, you can just take the exact change out and pay. Why should you have to give a program access to everything when you just want to edit one text file?

This might be one of the best example of Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle talk [0]. I wish there are a lot of tutorial or course with the same quality as this one.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc.

Original link on Vimeo is dead: https://vimeo.com/36579366.

>> They continuously run every time you make any change to them.

>Which is very much unlike what a program does.

You're saying "Program that run continuously every time you make any change are very much unlike what a program does?" That doesn't make any sense to me at all, can you please try to rephrase it?

Speaking of program that run continuously, have you ever seen Bret Victor's talks "The Future of Programming" and "Inventing on Principle", or heard of Doug Engelbart's work?

The Future of Programming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

Inventing on Principle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc

HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315328

"I'm totally confident that in 40 years we won't be writing code in text files. We've been shown the way [by Doug Engelbart NLS, Grail, Smalltalk, and Plato]." -Bret Victor

Do you still maintain that "Excel sheets in their widely used form are not instructions or behaviour", despite the examples and citation I gave you? If so, I'm pretty sure we're not talking about the same Microsoft Excel, or even using the same Wikipedia.

Your definition is arbitrarily gerrymandered because you're trying to drag the editor into the definition of the language, while I'm talking about the representation and structure of the language itself, which defines the language, not the tools you use to edit it, which don't define the language.

I'll repeat what I already wrote, defining how you can distinguish a non-visual text programming language like C++ from a visual programming language like a spreadsheet or Max/MSP by the number of dimensions and structure of its syntax:

>But the actual structure and syntax of a C++ program that you edit in VI is simply a one-dimensional stream of characters, not a two-dimensional grid of interconnected objects, values, graphical attributes, and formulas, with relative and absolute two-dimensional references, like a spreadsheet.

Text programming languages are one-dimensional streams of characters.

Visual programming languages are two-dimensional and graph structured instead of sequential (or possibly 3d, but that makes them much harder to use and visualize).

The fact that you can serialize the graph representation of a visual programming language into a one-dimensional array of bytes to save it to a file does not make it a text programming language.

The fact that you can edit the one-dimensional stream of characters that represents a textual programming language in a visual editor does not make it a visual programming language.

Microsoft Visual Studio doesn't magically transform C++ into a visual programming language.

PSIBER is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical PostScript programming environment that I wrote years after the textual PostScript language was designed at Adobe and defined in the Red Book, but it didn't magically retroactively transform PostScript into a visual language, it just implemented a visual graphical user interface to the textual PostScript programming language, much like Visual Studio implements a visual interface to C++, which remains a one-dimensional textual language. And the fact that PostScript is a graphical language that can draw on the screen or paper doesn't necessarily make it a visual programming language.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...

It's all about the representation and syntax of the language itself, not what you use it for, or how you edit it.

Do you have a better definition, that doesn't misclassify C++ or PostScript or Excel or Max/MSP?

⬐ lmm

> You're saying "Program that run continuously every time you make any change are very much unlike what a program does?" That doesn't make any sense to me at all, can you please try to rephrase it?

Running continuously every time you make any change is very much unlike what a program does. Programming is characteristically about controlling the sequencing of instructions/behaviour, and someone editing a spreadsheet in the conventional (non-macro) way is not doing that.

> Do you still maintain that "Excel sheets in their widely used form are not instructions or behaviour", despite the examples and citation I gave you? If so, I'm pretty sure we're not talking about the same Microsoft Excel, or even using the same Wikipedia.

This is thoroughly dishonest of you. You edited those points and examples into your comment, there was no mention of macros or "programming by demonstration" at the point when I hit reply.

To respond to those added arguments now: I suspect those features are substantially less popular than Ruby. Your own source states that Microsoft themselves discourage the use of the things you're talking about. Excel is popular and it may be possible to write programs in it, but writing programs in it is not popular and the popular uses of Excel are not programs. Magic: The Gathering is extremely popular and famously Turing-complete, but it would be a mistake to see that as evidence for the viability of a card-based programming paradigm.

> Your definition is arbitrarily gerrymandered because you're trying to drag the editor into the definition of the language, while I'm talking about the representation and structure of the language itself, which defines the language, not the tools you use to edit it, which don't define the language.

Anything "visual" is necessarily going to be about how the human interacts with the language, because vision is something that humans have and computers don't (unless you're talking about a language for implementing computer vision or something).

> I'll repeat what I already wrote, defining how you can distinguish a non-visual text programming language like C++ from a visual programming language like a spreadsheet or Max/MSP by the number of dimensions and structure of its syntax:

But you can't objectively define whether a given syntactic construct is higher-dimensional or not. Plenty of languages have constructs that describe two- or more-dimensional spaces - e.g. object inheritance graphs, effect systems. Whether we consider these languages to be visual or not always comes down to how programmers typically interact with them.

> PSIBER is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical PostScript programming environment that I wrote years after the textual PostScript language was designed at Adobe and defined in the Red Book, but it didn't magically retroactively transform PostScript into a visual language

There's nothing magical about new tools changing what kind of language a given language is. Lisp was a theoretical language for reasoning about computation until someone implemented an interpreter for it and turned it into a programming language.

⬐ lispm

> Lisp was a theoretical language for reasoning about computation until someone implemented an interpreter for it and turned it into a programming language.

Lisp was designed and developed as a real programming language. That it was a theoretical language first is wrong.

How to be agile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtkouFS-GSQ

Inventing on Principle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc

REST/GraphQL alternative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS3i3DTUnAI

Anything by Bret Victor.

Inventing on Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QiPFmIMxFc

Future of Programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4