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Comment by crdrost | Hacker News Reader

Related to the visual simulations, one of Alan Kay's favorite demos over the years has been to show folks Sketchpad,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI

partly as a "this is what we were doing in 1962, you are now as far removed from that demo as that demo was removed from the year 1900 -- do you really feel like you've made the analogous/concomitant progress in programming?" ... and one of his points there was that a lot of programming acts as a "pop music" where you are trying to replicate the latest new sounds and marginally iterate on those, rather than study the classics and the greats and the legacy of awesome things that had been done in the past.

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I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

That specialist interfaces make you productive?

Sketchpad was just a cad tool, one of the first ones to be sure, but still a design tool.

We have substantially better ones today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIa4LpqI2EI

So in 62 years have we improved the state of the art in design by as much as between 1900 to 1962?

Yes. I'd say we have and more.

I'm just putting this Alan Kay question (from Stack Overflow) here because of relevance.

In that question, he's considered not with implementation or how good the execution of an idea is (which is certainly one type of progress), but in genuinely new ideas.

I don't think I personally am qualified to say yes or no. There are new data structures since then for example, but those tend to be improvements over existing ideas rather than "fundamental new ideas" which I understand him (perhaps wrongly) to be asking for.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i...

this is awfully manual, does autocad have parametric topology tools ?

programs like houdini are more reactive and mathematical (no need to create width/volume by hand and trim intersections by hand), i think mech engineering tools (memory fail here) have options like this

No idea, I mostly use freecad and I've been told autocad has more tools.

In freecard there are parametric tools which are very much like what was shown in the demo but in 3d.

I tend to use script which render to openscad for the parts that I want to be parametric.

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