Dynamicland

More overlap than you think!

In his talk - https://vimeo.com/115154289 - Bret has a footnote reference to Radical Atoms group (Hiroshi's group)

I'm not sure I understand why one would expect that any language that is meant to be created in physical space should aim for the most minimal syntax.

Regular folks who don't program in their daily life connect best with things they can read: presenting them with lisp is a bit like presenting them with mathmatical notation: even if those that are marginally familiar with them will say it's simple, it's exactly too difficult to be accessible for people who have _no_ familiarity with them at all. You actually want that verbosity of added syntax, because it lets people recognize something in what is inherently alien to them.

I'm reminded of an old bash.org quote:

    <erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_.
    it responds to ping, it works completely,
    I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

perhaps I'm missing something, but wouldn't large-scale adoption like they're projecting be really hard on the environment?

Dynamicland introduces a 1:1, persistent mapping between virtual and tangible. won't this kill a lot of trees?

Right now, each piece of paper in Dymanicland is a program. You put a piece of paper down and it "runs" - the metaphor breaks down at this point though. With a little bit of code, anything in Dynamicland can become "alive" and interactive.

For me, the impressive part of Dymanicland is how physical everything is. Want to see how something works? Find the paper that the code is printed on. Need help understanding some code? Bring somebody over to the wall, table, or couch where the code is. You can annotate the paper, draw diagrams on it, cut it, fold it, tear it, put it in a book to help others learn how it works. Want to edit some code? Point an "editor" token at the paper program you want to modify, then start changing the code.

Dynamicland isn't a room with a computer, it's a room that is a computer.

I think you can make some more sense of this if you read the piece, and watch the video on laser socks [0]. That was a game designed at the CDG lab that is the pre-cursor to Dynamicland.

[0]: http://glench.com/LaserSocks/

I've spent a decent amount of time looking at Dynamicland-related things, and it seems consistently grandiose + vague. Maybe it's just that the material they're putting out is more for investors than other hackers. Not sure. The language rubs me the wrong way though:

  Dynamicland is a communal computer,
  designed for agency, not apps,
  where people can think like whole humans.

  It's the next step in our mission to
  incubate a humane dynamic medium
  whose full power is accessible to all people.

Just take "designed for agency, not apps" for example. It's a nice rhetorical technique to contrast apps with agency like this, suggesting that apps somehow deprive one of agency and that Dynamicland can restore it—but it feels pretty disingenuous if you think about it for a minute. (There's a section on the page also titled "Agency, not apps", which brings me no closer to feeling that the use of 'agency' is justified.) In actuality each platform (traditional computing, Dynamicland) has tradeoffs in terms of what one's agency is applicable toward. I can see no reason to think Dynamicland is an increase in agency over traditional computing rather than a lateral (and perhaps complementary) change. I agree it's nice to use your body rather than just fingers, but unless I can do the same things with the 'alternative medium' (and there is no material I've found suggesting a level of generality even in the same realm as traditional computing), I'll complement my computer use with other physical activities and face the reality of fingers for input until a true alternative comes along.

I agree the problem they are addressing is epic, and their language is suitable for describing it, but from what I'm able to glean about the project, the solution so far is on the level of 'neat,' and maybe important for introducing new users to programming—but, if that's what it's for, just say it! Instead we see that the aim of the project is to 'reinvent computing for the 21st century'. So am I going to do my taxes with this? Am I going to use it write novels? To design 3D models? To conduct research? To build artificial intelligence? To discover new medicines? To call an Uber? Is there any reason to think it might attain the level of generality where it could at any point be an actual alternative to contemporary computing? Or are we supposed to take this on faith because of the people involved? How could this compete with similar systems designed in AR? It seems to me like there's more 'agency' in AR since a system like this could be replicated within it, but with AR we'd likely have a number of alternative 'physical computing platforms' like it (Of course not soon, but they're talking about a timeline of at least 50 years for this project).

It's definitely refreshing to be able to interact with 'real' objects ('physical' would be less rhetoric-laden), but I feel like the novelty and suggestive language here may tempt readers into forgetting how much power was gained through computation specifically because it didn't require fiddling with physical objects. It's a big deal, and I'm pretty sure that a legitimate alternative computational medium will require deep theoretical breakthroughs, of which I've seen no suggestion here.

Check their Twitter https://twitter.com/Dynamicland1

Could you elaborate on how Realtalk works? There's a lot of information on Dynamicland, but not much on Realtalk. The gist is that it's like OOP, but physical. But I'm curious as to the exact details of how the printer example (https://dynamicland.org/faq/) might work.

> Yet I can't find any way of experimenting with this system myself.

Given that it's a physical space... you go to the physical space. You can pick up the source code for the entire thing there - it's self-hosting, so you can read it like any other object in Dynamicland. You can also copy it physically, using a scanner.[0] Actually finding a suitable physical space and building a community might be the the hardest part of replicating it.

It's also a very early project - the first Dynamicland space opens next year. I'm sure we'll learn more about it, but the entire point of it is that it's not online - it's a physical space and a community meeting in real life, and if you want to learn about it and maybe try to replicate it, you'll have to go there.

[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg

A small technical point: "Hypercard in the World" was one of the prototype systems that came before Realtalk, which is the operating system and protocol that runs Dynamicland.

You should be happy to hear that Bret Victor is behind Dynamicland https://dynamicland.org/about-us/

Something I really dislike about the way he presents his work is that he is intentionally really really vague about what his contribution was to those various products, in his presentations he often shows a few slides "I worked on this, this and this", where the iPad and watch get shown..

Like, what did you do? Design the home screen? Design the vision of the machine itself? It's ambiguity taken to its highest extreme.

I really respect his work and publications though, no doubt that he made important contributions to the products he shows on his slides.

Their FAQ seems to disagree with you:

Is Dynamicland open source?

Dynamicland shares many core values with the open source movement and in some ways goes beyond them.

A primary design principle at Dynamicland is that all running code must be visible, physically printed on paper. Thus whenever a program is running, its source code is right there for anybody to see and modify. Likewise the operating system itself is implemented as pages of code, and members of the community constantly modify and improve it.

That said, the pages of code physically in Dynamicland are not in a git repository. The community organizes code spatially — laying it out on tables and walls, storing it in folders, binders, and bookshelves.

https://dynamicland.org/faq/

I can see this being very useful for Software Engineers, although I agree with you not directly for building systems. Scrum boards, build statuses and project statistics are good candidates for this system.

I can also see it being useful as a very general _and_ powerful prototyping tool, one of the demos shows someone making an input controller from a physical spring and a colored piece of clay.

When it becomes so easy to integrate your environment with the computer, I can only begin to imagine what's possible.

Since the programs are printed out and stored in filing cabinets, it'd be too bad if something cool happening at one Dynamicland instance couldn't be easily shared with another instance somewhere else. We know that computing would be better if it was shared in a physical space with real-world social circles. But not everybody has those: some people are disabled, or rural, or outcasts. The same issue comes up with experiments with local meshes and P2P gossip for new social networks.

Not as many people meet strangers in chat rooms or games these days, but it'd be sad if the baby of connecting people anywhere was thrown out with the bathwater of big social panopticons and glass screen prisons.

Reminds me of the introduction to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which says nearly the same, that problems in computer science are unbounded by physical limitations (barring the hardware it's run on).

I tend to agree. Physical fetishism seems like a retreat from the core values of computing.

Arguably then it’s not for you. I’m someone who comes from a background of the visual arts and always found the monolithic seeming walls of text that most programs come in very daunting until I found things like Processing where you can do things and have a quick, iterative visual approach to what you want to make.

I’m sure there were people who were against the concept of syntax highlighting when it began for similar reasons but I would hazard a guess that most people who code regularly find it invaluable.

I grant you that this probably won’t be useful for say, kernel programming, but it is also extremely new and an experiment. The worst thing we can do is ossify our ways of thinking and not be open to new and experimental ideas.

Brett Victor has done numerous experiments to try to improve the way we can visualise data or be more creative with it, combining the freedom of drawing on paper with the reproducibility of software.

I think what they are doing at DynamicLand is trying to similar experiments as Douglas Engelbart back in the 60s to try and find ways to bring more of the other innate skills we have into a computer that is not via a keyboard.

So like the mouse, it might seem like a toy but it has the potential to be combined with pure programming.

Also especially with neural networks that are learning how to code, we may be able to give more physical input to a neural network and it will produce the program.

All this is looking far into the future, so they don't know what the final outcome is either, but they're experimenting to find what works.

At least a laptop can become more, the opportunity to delve deeper in the system or learn how to code your own applications is always there if the curiosity should ever arise.

Tablets on the other hand... literally just consumption devices, even creative applications in them are locked up and siloed unable to inter-operate.

Things like the Google home and Amazon echo are a step in that direction. Using the internet just by asking questions out loud are a novel way to interact with a computer. Can't wait to see where this goes.

> You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes.

From the reverse: if something happens, how can I tell which piece of paper somewhere in the room made that happen?

Maybe I've missed something. I'm not sure what's magical about someone shouting that their smartphone is a prison.

Do you see yourself using this as an alternative to your current computer/phone? For the things I use computers for, it seems that Dynamicland would not be applicable, so I'm having a hard time understanding why some are finding this so exciting.

(Don't get me wrong, I think it looks neat, and the problem it's addressing is important—but it does not appear to be an actual general-purpose alternative computing platform. And I've seen/read most everything put out related to the project if I'm not mistaken. Feel free to suggest me new things if someone thinks it has general-purpose computing capabilities.)

Then you’ll like: https://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/1968-demo-interactive.h...

I'd personally really like for code to go away / not need to use it. It's an important bootstrapping step, but really only the hardware of the 60s and 70s more / less needed text, files, and source code.

With the physical environment of Dynamicland, "code" can be re-represented using physical objects, and we may not even need it. That's a really exciting idea!

A good stepping stone to exploring this space would be a useable complete system in which you layout high level concerns such as architecture, use-cases, and user-interface behaviour using a "system 2" style, and can dive into code just for the details. A separation of which concerns are built using declarative modelling (the "system 2" stuff), infrastructure built using a normal imperative programming language, and the actual business logic when it can't be generated entirely from models being implemented in a functional programming language with a strict subset of the procedural code.

And most importantly (and probably the most work) the user interface for this would have to be extremely polished and well-thought-out.

> We will be hosting open house events, classes, and studio hours at Dynamicland Oakland in 2018. Please join our mailing list [1] for announcements.

1: https://tinyletter.com/Dynamicland

Also, I saw a demo of a similar technology in the 1990s at Sussex University, in which a projector was used to create an interactive table where one could write calculations with a pen and the results would appear projected (the numbers having been recognized) and sketches could be augmented with shape-recognition

See the FAQ [1] which answers some, but not all, of your questions.

1: https://dynamicland.org/faq/

As I understand it, the dots are just a temporary measure while the team works on implementing better methods of detecting objects.

They probably have a camera and a projector on the ceiling. The camera detects the dots on sheets of paper to be able to differentiate them. You will probably need a computer to code what each sheet is going to do.

> Every scrap of paper has the capabilities of a full computer, while remaining a fully-functional scrap of paper.

this is probably a false statement...

Aren't we lucky to have stumbled upon the "correct tool for the job" at our first attempt.

Here is the code for Realtalk: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg

Source: https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/907253802931126272

Don't forget that programming languages get more abstract and hence more powerful with fewer lines of code. RealTalk has functions you can call to get the physical location of a piece of paper and being based on Lua makes it much more expressive than C++. You can keep digging down levels of abstraction but the interesting parts of this system are extremely accessible.

Yep. And when you think that's bad, then you see some of the comments here which appear to be aping it for free...

I'm not sure what kind of software you write, but every large piece of software I've ever worked on has required collaboration, and collaboration done well builds better software than any one coder could write by themselves.

What do you mean?

If anything, I believe that Dynamicland and "books not apps" attitude can only complement each other.

So do many of the Silicon Valley executives who are pushing their privacy invading products on schools. That's why they send their own children to private "tech-free" schools to prevent them from being exposed to the same products that pay their parents' bills.