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Comment by PaulJoslin | Hacker News Reader

At first, I enjoyed watching this, it allowed me to see a glimpse of pg writing one of these famous essays.

However, after the initial 'wow' factor, I realized a slight flaw in this idea of learning by solely watching others (in replay). You see, without any context of changes or explanations for the mistakes that have been made and corrected, I as a viewer may as well just wait for the final product - as the learning is limited.

If this was with programming (a potential target use) for example, I may be none the wiser why the person writing the code suddenly deleted a chunk of code and replaced it with something else, unless of course some annotation / narration was provided to accompany the replay.

Don't take this as a negative point, the idea is great, but I think it could be far more useful with this added feature.

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While I agree that annotations would be awesome, there's a lot of value to be found in what already exists.

Part of the appeal of pg's writing is how ... "tight" it is. The man just plain writes well. It was helpful to see a lot of the weaker bits of sentence structure flagged to be pruned later. I could see the same difficulty I experience in structuring my thoughts expressed through three or four iterations of a sentence being hurriedly typed and just as quickly deleted.

Again, annotations would be wonderful, but I'm not sure they're going to happen. Aside from the feature not even existing yet, that would mean the author would need to both want to and be able to go back through the revision history and describe what they were thinking at the time. I doubt most people would be able to do this well, and have strong doubts that anyone would want to do it regularly.

There's a lot to gain here already. Combining the frequency of edits with what actually is changing can give you a pretty good insight into the author's thought process.

I agree, this functionality is not required to make the product succeed. The product is already useful in itself.

I was merely referring to a use case of someone learning to program / think like a programmer by watching replays of real programmers doing their job. e.g. similar to pair programming / training with a mentor, but be distributional across the internet.

As far as 'training' / 'learning':

- If the student looks at some finished code, they can understand how to do something for a specific use case once, but maybe not know how the original programmer got to that solution.

- If the student watches someone write that code, they can understand how to write something similar again themselves and know roughly the process of thought that was used.

- If however, the student can not only watch someone write that code, but also 'understand' why they wrote certain code in places or why they changed the code throughout the process, then they will not only learn how to write for this particular use case, but become a more competent programmer and be able to apply what they learnt to many situations, in context of what is required.

that's what screencasts are for - write code and annotate it with with a voiceover as you along. There is big enough niche between plain text code and screencasts.

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