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The Future of Programming (2013) [video]

166 points by jackdoe

by tov_objorkin

6 subcomments

I was greatly inspired by his work. After getting enough skills, I even built my own IDE with live coding and time traveling. Its practical use is questionable, and it seems like nobody is really interested in such tools.
Playground: https://anykey111.github.io
Images: https://github.com/anykey111/xehw

by dang

0 subcomment

Related. Others? I thought there were others, since I remember this one as a classic...
The Future of Programming (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746821 - July 2025 (10 comments)
Bret Victor – The Future of Programming (2013) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944225 - May 2025 (1 comment)
The Future of Programming (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32912639 - Sept 2022 (1 comment)
The Future of Programming (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15539766 - Oct 2017 (66 comments)
References for “The Future of Programming” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051577 - July 2016 (26 comments)
Bret Victor The Future of Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050549 - July 2014 (2 comments)
The Future of Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6129148 - July 2013 (341 comments)

by pjmlp

2 subcomments

The future we have yet to achieve as we kept ourselves too busy doing UNIX clones.
While the ecosystem got a few good ideas for software development, even the authors eventually moved on to creating other OS and programming languages designs, some of which closer to those ideas like Inferno and Limbo, or ACME in Plan 9.

by floppyd

3 subcomments

The non-linear code structure (including visually) is something I've been thinking about for a long time and arrived at very naturally. I'm the "spread all the papers on the table to take in every interaction all at once" type of person, and so often I imagined a code editor that would allow me to just "cut" a piece of code and move it to the side. Separating stuff into files is kinda this, but it's not visual and just creates a lot of mess when I try to separate out small functions that are not reusable somewhere else. I don't even need the underlying non-linearity — just let me move the papers around on my code desk!

by kreetx

1 subcomments

This part is interesting with regarding to LLMs: https://youtu.be/8pTEmbeENF4?t=817. He presents as if it were the year 1973, pokes fun at APIs (think HTTP), then says that computers in the future will figure out by themselves how to talk to each other. The opposite had become true when the presentation was actually done, but now the situation is turning.

by LAC-Tech

1 subcomments

Probably my favourite tech talk of all time. I did at least read the actor model paper! (though the 1973 one doesn't say much, you want the one with Baker, "Laws for Communicating Sequential Processes".
I still don't know what he means about not liking APIs though. "Communicating with Aliens", what insight am I missing?

by senthil_rajasek

2 subcomments

In case, like me, you didn't know who Bret Victor is,
"...Victor worked as a human interface inventor at Apple Inc. from 2007 until 2011." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor

by phtrivier

3 subcomments

Call me grumpy and sleep deprived, but every year I look at this talk again, and every year I wonder... "now, what" ? What am I supposed to do, as a programmer, to change this sad state of things ?
Start the n-th "visual" or "image based" programming language (hoping to at least, make _different_ mistakes than the ones that doomed smalltalk and all other 'assemble boxes to make a program' things ?)
Start an OS, hoping to be able to get an "hello world" in qemu in a year or two of programming in my sparse free time ?
Ask an LLM to write all that would be so cool ?
Become a millionaire selling supplements, and fund a group of smart programmers to do it for me ?
Honest question. Once you've seen this "classic" talk ("classic", in the sense that it is now old enough to work in some countries), what did you start doing ? What did you stop doing ? What did you change ?

by jackdoe

0 subcomment

Loosely related is "Stop Writing Dead Programs" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s

by laszlokorte

0 subcomment

My favorite Bret Victor talk ever is „Drawing dynamic visualizations“ [1] that made me try to reverse engineer [2] the demonstrated tool that he sadly never released.
[1]: https://youtu.be/ef2jpjTEB5U?si=S7sYRIDJKbdiwYml
[2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfGbKGqfmpEJofmpKra57N0FT...

by sodapopcan

1 subcomments

This is one of my favourite talks ever! Glad to see it here (probably again).
Also, Erlang (non-explicitly) mentioned!
Also, I'm super glad we never got those "APIs" he was talking about. What a horrid thought.

0 subcomment

by Zhyl

2 subcomments

I love Bret Victor and believe he has some very important things to say about design (UI design, language design and general design) but a lot of his concepts don't scale or abstract as well as he seems to be implying (ironic because he has a full essay on "The Ladder of Abstraction" [0]).
He makes some keen observations about how tooling in certain areas (especially front end design) is geared towards programmers rather than visual GUI tools, and tries to relate that back to a more general point about getting intuition for code, but I think this is only really applicable when there is a visual metaphor for the concept that there is an intuition to be gotten about.
To that end, rather than "programming not having progressed", a better realisation of his goals would be better documentation, interactive explainers, more tooling for editing/developing/profiling for whatever use case you need it for and not, as he would be implying, that all languages are naively missing out on the obvious future of all programming (which I don't think is an unfair inference from the featured video where he's presenting all programming like it's still the 1970s).
He does put his money where his mouth is, creating interactive essays and explainers that put his preaching into practice [1] which again are very good for those specific concepts but don't abstract to all education.
Similarly he has Dynamicland [2] which aims to be an educational hacker space type place to explore other means of programming, input etc. It's a _fascinating_ experiment and there are plenty of interesting takeaways, but it still doesn't convince me that the concepts he's espousing are the future of programming. A much better way to teach kids how computers work and how to instruct them? Sure. Am I going to be writing apps using bits of paper in 2050? Probably not.
An interesting point of comparison would be the Ken Iverson "notation as a tool of thought" which also tries to tackle the notion of programming being cumbersome and unintuitive, but comes at it very much from the mathematical, problem solving angle rather than the visual design angle. [3]
[0] https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
[1] https://worrydream.com/KillMath/
[2] https://dynamicland.org/
[3] https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

by enos_feedler

1 subcomments

had the privilege to be there in person. was magical live

by ModernMech

1 subcomments

My unpopular opinion is if we had just done a lot of the stuff Bret has been talking about for 10 years -- investing in better developer tooling -- we could have realized productivity gains better than what AI provides without having to spin up massive data centers. Unfortunately "dev tools" don't get funding today unless they're "AI dev tools".

by androng

0 subcomment

https://toolong.link/v?w=8pTEmbeENF4&l=en

by craftkiller

0 subcomment

Thank you! I've had the bit starting at 22:00 stuck in my head for the past decade but I could never remember which tech talk it came from.

by keepamovin

3 subcomments

I like this guy. His work! But it seems like everything he did is from 10+ years ago. Where is he now?!?!

by masgis

3 subcomments

Bret Victor speaks so idealistically it's difficult to disagree with his vision, but in reality he's a radicalized, scrappy cult leader. His ideas sound super cool but they're impractical - that's why nobody can make them work. We're delusional for worshiping him.
https://christophlocher.com/notes/ethnographic-research-on-d...

by dzonga

0 subcomment

does that mean things like graphql will make a comeback in the A.I world ?
since with graphql - an agent / a.i can probe - gradually to what information another program can give vs a finite set of interfaces in REST ?

by haritha-j

0 subcomment

Look at the big brain on Bret!

by pmkary

0 subcomment

The biggest wish I have is to one day meet maestro. Greatest living mind in my opinion.

by phplovesong

0 subcomment

Instead of this we got AI slop that is literally everywhere you look.

by Will-Reppeto

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by jason-richar15

0 subcomment

[flagged]