look i'm as much of a bret victor fanboi as the next guy, but that one felt a little like "whoa ok you're too cool for school now huh"
I’m not familiar with him or his work beyond the cursory glance at his Wikipedia page that I made after recognizing the homepage from marginalia.nu binges, but I associated the statement with a certain level of exhaustion, or disinclination rather, from the desire to publicly comment on whatever bleeding edge or attention-grabbing topic a man of his profession and experience may encounter. I have no clue what this guy does with certainty, it sounds sort of Alan Kay-like? But based off this post it sounds like there’s a lot of ground he intends to cover with whatever he’s got going on that requires a lot of thought. Thought that he is reluctant to share at a toot’s notice.
Unfortunately, the demo he showed in that talk never really turned in to a product or movement that revolutionized programming as at the time many of us hoped it might.
And, having been one of those impressed with the demo, now I look back on it thinking "this business of software is cargo-culting the whole way down, isn't it."
A particularly simple and amazing tool for this is p5.js, with an editor that, to me, enables exactly the kind of workflow shown here: editor.p5js.org
Whatever you are going to do, you can draw alongside to help you make sense of it better. I do this on my own mind sometimes, but for example visualizing and small neural networks (which I have been messing around with) can't be done on my imagination alone.
I think the important is just that you have some library that makes drawing easy, and put it alongside your work. Of course, it's extra work to make diagrams of everything. But sometimes they really help. I think it's important to simply have this possibility in mind.
(maybe it should have a name? Visualization-enhanced programming? Print-programming? I think (e.g. jupyter) notebooks strive toward this, although tbh I prefer the p5js environment without a linear format)
It should be up to us to decide if and when this extra work is worthwhile. I think really designing (and discovering) things is what benefits the most from this style (i.e. game design, product design, scientific experimentation). So you need programmers working on a design problem and/or designers working on a programming problem; or you could have them side-by-side collaborating (and not just a designer imagining things, and a programmer following specifications to the letter).
It also requires a kind of artistic taste to make things look good, but of course that's something you can develop.
It's a really enjoyable process to be able to get a feel for what you're doing!
(See here: https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/sLA07wpa_ for some personal experiments in visualizing graphs and sparse neural nets, https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/1Bb5VIHi2 for designing an algorithm to efficiently make a roguelike map)
I think you're saying is that we don't get this for 'free'. There's probably no tool (although maaaybe AI could help?) that just instantly visualizes anything you could do. Instead it's up to us to do it :) (although good graphics libraries and a tool that encourages you to recompile often is almost essential imo!)
And here's the kind of art I could likely never just simply imagine to existence, experimentation is essential! https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/pVFFT_8E5
That p5 editor looks nice for this sort of thing. It's important to be able to get the visualizations in quickly, otherwise you risk wasting time.
A tool I've dreamed up, that I never seem to have time to implement, is to send debug information to some form of database, and then being able to query and render that data as you like (from another client). To see bar/line charts of data, spatial visuals, more abstract graphs like in your examples, timeline scrubbers, etc... maybe some day I'll get around to making it.
Anyway, thanks for your comment. I'm interested in this kind of thing.
He was already pretty famous before that from Magic Ink, if not even earlier work.
Heck, even within one's field, Bret may have neat ideas about interfaces for programming and attained a sort of celebrity status for some of us, but that doesn't mean he can confidently answer random questions from strangers. He's a researcher, not a guru.
Use good science, but run weird experiments!
Jürgen Klopp when asked about this opinion on COVID?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ4bKnpxbYc — great answer in a time where every-fucking-body had to share their opinion on it, and still do.
Also the message was great, the combination rarely happens!
You can argue that it shouldn’t be zero sum. But time and attention both are, and you can’t focus fully if you’re trying to “grow an audience.”