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Comment by siavosh | Hacker News Reader

Great to see the credit to Bret Victor and Chris Granger's Light Table. Apple's resources can really help move forward these new ideas of what an IDE can be. If Swift is successful, a whole generation of young developers will use and improve on these ideas. Very exciting to see what happens.

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Why do Bret V and Chris G get all the credit for something invented in the 90s? E.g. Steering programs with time travel (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.33....).

> The approach to steering described in this paper is implemented in our research prototype, which runs on Sun and Hewlett-Packard color workstations, using Lucid Common Lisp and the Garnet user interface development system [Myers et al. 1990].

Because they made some impressive demos to reintroduce the concepts at a time when the audience is ready for them.

Fine, but if this guy was just inspired by and knew about LightTable and Bret's demos, he is missing a lot of good ideas and experiences that have been gathered over the last 30 years in doing similar things. They are destined to relearn the past.

I agree, and frankly I think Bret Victor in particular hasn't until recently referenced his influences enough.

Because many young developers seem not to care to learn about our history.

Speaking of giving credit and new ideas, see this 20 year old work: http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/ZStep/ZStep.html

I honestly expected Bret Victor to do the demo on Swift after seeing the realtime playground etc.

fwiw, he had no direct involvement in it. http://www.quora.com/Did-Bret-Victor-work-with-Apple-on-the-...

You are correct he was not involved. But the language creator specifically calls him and Lightroom out as inspiration.

I love that his account's URL is http://www.quora.com/Bret-Victor-1, because http://www.quora.com/Bret-Victor was already dedicated to his name as a topic.

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