Comment by janpaul123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by janpaul123 | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I was asked to repost this (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), so here goes. I'm JP, and I created this project after visiting Dynamicland a couple of times. I wanted to capture some of the magic there in my living room, and decided to implement the "programs running on pieces of paper" part.

It was super fun implementing this. I ended up using OpenCV.js, which has only just been released, reimplementing an OpenCV algorithm and learning about computer vision, learning about OffscreenCanvas, which is so experimental that it crashes periodically (a bug I was able to isolate and submit to the Chrome dev team), learning about how to mount a projector facing downward, and so on.

Few things are as satisfying as a piece of paper rolling out of a printer literally onto the floor, where it starts executing. And then cutting it up with a pair of scissors to change its shape.

I hope you have as much fun with this as I do!!

PS: If you want more inspiration for building cool stuff with projectors and cameras, check this out: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/pico/ :) They have a ton more interesting projects like that!

I've been seeing folks get excited about this, and haven't yet been able to see why it is so interesting. However, the people behind it (Bret Victor et al) and who I've seen playing with it are too interesting for me to ignore this...

I'm excited, because it fits my current workflow.

I do very little of my coding on a computer. Instead, I build up all the discrete parts of my code using sticky notes, that kind of get constantly re-organised while I'm writing.

So my desk ends up as a mess of sticky notes that get pushed and pulled around, which seems a lot like what you can do with this - except you can also run each part of this code, instead of relying solely on your memory.

It's a very different kind of interaction than with code on the screen, and fits the way one thinks in a much more concrete way. It's like an embodied metaphor, one that people are intimately familiar with, and the immediacy of it allows you to iterate quickly as you have direct feedback, and the whole structure is made visible for everyone to see, enabling a kind of collaboration unusual for computer programming (image the dynamic of a group of people trying to build a tent together compared to a group of people all staring at a static view of an IDE).

Of course, it's nothing groundbreaking just yet, but I can't help but get excited at the possibilities of this sort of medium.

I wouldn't be surprised if tangible coding could be a lot better of an environment for debugging. Something with real physical space makes it much easier for me to follow the flow of things than scrolling things on a screen.

I still don't see how this is true, either in this case or in Dynamicland - neither of those seem to OCR programs from the piece of paper. So you still do classical programming alone, and only get to play with the results. A piece of paper may contain the actual program behind system's reaction to it, or it may contain a picture of a cat - the contents are irrelevant; it's the dots that matter.

If you write small programs that interact with other programs, then rearranging them on the floor/table becomes a form of programming (similar to how combining UNIX-style programs in shell scripts is a high-level form of programming).

So even when playing just with the papers, you can be programming.

There's also the interplay of arranging papers, and live-editing the code in a particular piece of paper. In Dynamicland, the projector highlights printed code in green/red to visualize diffs.

You can sketch a UI element on the paper (eg a rectangle and token for a numerical slider), then go back to code the interactivity. Units in the code are inches on the table. Subtle things like that break you free from the laptop.

When you want to "commit" your code changes, you print a new version.

One of the more interesting things that I've seen in Dynamicland is that it allows you to create programs that modify other programs - basically the beginnings of a physical IDE. You can use a scrubber or dial to modify a constant, as a very basic first step.

IMHO, the ability to create new physical interfaces to editing code might allow for new programming paradigms to pop up, or better interfaces for people to develop logic in their own domain. Someone could combine a calculator interface and a context-sensitive variable selection interface to write arithmetic logic using an interface/"syntax" that they already understand, and debug all the way through that with a testbed program that allows the programmer to set variables to specific values and work through how the math works. You can have yet another program which describes a program as a flowchart and allows people to edit it that way.

The thing is, as you make the IDE physical, you get to invite people to interact with it more - rather than staring at a screen, suddenly you're livecoding, you can have multiple people working on it at once. "Ah, but doesn't that fail if you do this? Sets some variables on the testbed", or "I can fix the UI while you update that calculation".

And then, when your accountant has something on a piece of paper that works, they could point a "make this an app on my computer" program at it and bring it out of Dynamicland, into their workplace.

Seeing the Dynamicland tweets made me rethink all of Bret Victor's previous work, and I wrote up why it's interesting from a design perspective here: http://vitor.io/on-dynamicland

What project are you referring to that Bret Victor is involved in? I don't see his name anywhere.

https://dynamicland.org/about-us/

Talk from 2014 that previewed the vision: http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/

Respect for the fact you give generous credit to Dynamicland while also saying honestly how your project is differentiated. It would have been easy not to

Hi, I'm honestly confused by the statement "Paper Programs is not a clone of Dynamicland". All the ideas about how it works seem to come from Dynamicland, and everything it does seems to be designed to work exactly the way it does in Dynamicland.

So, how is it not a clone? If I had to describe it to someone based on what I learned from the website, I would say "Paper Programs is a browser-based JS clone of Dynamicland's paper programming system." Is that incorrect?

I think that section is clear. It's not a clone because Dynamicland is a building in Oakland. An open-source software project can port some of the experience, but to clone it you would need to establish a large physical space.

I'm excited about Paper Programs. I got to spend an afternoon in Dynamicland, and after exploring a couple hours I was sure that I wanted access to the system back home. Their response was "wait a couple years." Not everybody can make it to Oakland!

Dynamicland focuses on in-person collaboration. Maybe Paper Programs will explore tangible computing with remote collaboration.

Also, Dynamicland uses Realtalk, a programming language / operating system / protocol for physical computing that is more general than projectors/cameras/papers.

The title made me think it was js running on printed arm chips: https://venturebeat.com/2015/01/21/thinfilm-teams-with-xerox...

Projector added to my Amazon basket immediately! Thanks for sharing.

Do you have a specific product link?

Seconding; choosing an appropriate projectors (resolution, luminance, throw distance) is not a trivial task. I'd like to hear what people have found that fits.

I am eagerly awaiting the Bobby Tables (https://xkcd.com/327/) version for eval()

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