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Comment by azeirah | Hacker News Reader

So, where are all the companies that are building next-generation developer tools and direct manipulation document and simulation tools? It has been a while since this video got released.

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Apple has Swift Playgrounds as someone described.

Visual Studio has edit-and-continue, interactive REPL, visualizers, some sort of backtracking and now from Xamarin Interactive Workbooks.

Then you have the whole INotebook trend which started out with Python and nowadays supports multiple languages.

However all these tools are actually catching up with many of the features that Smalltalk-80, Interlip-D, Mesa/Cedar, Lisp Machines, Oberon already had.

This is what Bret Victor jokes about in another presentation of him, where he pretends we are in the 70's making predictions how the world of computers will look like in the 21st century.

The future of programming, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

Those experiences are not provided in smalltalk and Lisp machine, they are just a bit more interactive than others. In fact, playgrounds are inspired by inventing on principle and come closest to realizing just one of the demos, while the designs were obviously not around in the early 80s to guide anything.

You can definitely do "something" in smalltalk, lisp machine, but the experience was always hazily defined, and anyways, is quite niche. So as you resort to in your post, people tend to list technical features other than describe experiences, which, even after many of Bret's essays, still need further development before they are realized in production systems (we still don't really know what we want to do, especially what will scale beyond say playgrounds). Experience first, features that can realize it second.

We're building tonicdev.com (similar to iPython/Swift Playgrounds). A lot of these ideas are very difficult in the general case. For just one example, we spent a long time reasoning about time traveling (and came up with what we think is a great model for it - which takes into account the entire system including the filesystem, but it took considerable engineering effort and bleeding edge OS tools like CRIU: http://blog.tonicdev.com/2015/09/10/time-traveling-in-node.j... )

Xcode/iOS Swift Playgrounds is pretty close.

http://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/

The iPad Playgrounds uses a new bundle format called .playgroundbook

I have been exploring it in the past week and am very impressed.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/7584320300362...

Since Swift3 feature list is now finalized (https://apple.github.io/swift-evolution/), many of them will go into iPad playgrounds soon.

I am sure it will become great tool to learn Swift language as well as UIKit at many different levels.

My guess: developer tools are being developed in open source now. It is not financially interesting for companies to build developer tools.

Yes, FOSS somehow killed the development of software tools for anyone but the enterprise.

Given that many prefer to build something with duct tape than to pay for tools, the only ones left are the enterprise customers which hardly blink when they compare the tool's prices versus overall project costs.

One just needs to see the angry mobs on HN when JetBrains, Unity, Microsoft and others announce price changes.

Whereas on most enterprises I worked for, it is just a request to the Controller overseeing the project area.

I built the PixiJS playground [1] to teach myself how (WebGL/Canvas interactive framework) Pixi works in a practical manner.

Many of the variables can be changed live in the REPL or with sliders as the code is running. Images can be dragged and dropped into the browser for sprites.

I built reactive (pre-React) Pixi components to make this possible. Victor's work is definitely an inspiration.

In the end I used the components and knowledge to build a touch-compatible shelf-configurator for a client selling shelving products.

[1]: http://pixijs-playground.nextorig.in

We're working on a new Firefox debugger wtitten in react-redux, which we hope will be a platform for prototyping interactive/visual features.

https://github.com/jlongster/debugger.html

http://witheve.com

Take a look at the music-making industry, specifically all the synthesizers and DAW-style apps popping up on iOS. Those folks have been paying attention to Bret ..

There is time a traveling debugger in elm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS3yzUo7l8Y

Never really worked well in practice though, it falls apart once you use a 'port'. This was all back then not sure if things have changed.

Redux is the closest infrastructure that enables this stuff. The time travel aspects at least. Hot code reloading has definitely gone mainstream and if you look at a lot of the popular ones and trace their influences, many mention inspiration from Bret Victor.

Think you are missing (what I understand to be) his point.

The point is not that this is the UI of the future, the point is that there are other ways to conceptualize doing knowledge work with a machine, this is one.

Real innovation takes time...

Here's the man himself, Alan Kay, on the topic.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xero...

His demos only work with small amounts of code, scale up to the size of a real codebase and they all become infeasible, as well as not really that useful.

I think patterns of developmental and good tooling make it scale up at least in utility to larger projects. Worse case use the workbench analogy like the clojurescript oriented devcards project where you check in playground style simple environments that are designed to make it interactively developing sub systems and components easy.

You mean like the code at Xerox PARC and ETHZ?

Many of his ideas were already possible on the workstation OSes created there.

Agreed. But possible and popularized are two different things.

Since I started delving into computer archeology I wonder how the computing world have looked like if AT&T had been allocated to sell UNIX instead of having given it for free.

I’m developing Halik - time traveling debugger for JVM inspired by Learnable Programming. Emphasis on the ability to explore and visualize your program. See http://meet.halik.io.

PlayCanvas are doing this. Live development for WebGL across all devices simultaneously. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PS4oMLPyYfI

Using something like React-Hot-Loader & Redux-Devtools gets you pretty close for browser work.

When Swift was first announced it showed off a lot of stuff that was inspired by it.

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