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Comment by dack | Hacker News Reader

i'm always super impressed by brett victor and highly admire his work.

that said, I have to admit that it doesn't really feel "right" based on what I've seen. there's so many limitations to the physical world that a virtual space doesn't have. i get that physical objects can participate in the UI and that arranging things in 3D space is sometimes nicer than using a mouse/keyboard.

However, the fact that there is still code written on pieces of paper, and that the projector can only show a 2D image (which is only primitively interactable) just looks super awkward. and the question of "what can you do" when you're staring at a blank table seems tough

again, it's super cool research but i wonder if he has plans to resolve some of these fundamental issues with mixing real and virtual

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IMO the goal here isn't to replace traditional software engineering. It's to bring computing to spaces. Museums, classrooms, town halls, etc, which requires a different approach.

The mental model I use is professional cooking in a kitchen vs home cooking. Different scale, tools, and approaches but some overlap in core ideas.

A pro cook can criticize a home cook's workflow and tools, but the goals are different!

I think their goal is similar to what smalltalk's goal originally was: To allow for regular people to do complex things with a computer.

Ultimately, it didn't succeed in that goal but I believe inventing the first spreadsheet software can be counted as achieving some success there.

I admire this project and hope they can one day move beyond simply typing code on a sheet of paper to creating tools that actually make our compilers/IDEs look like using punch cards.

Without Smalltalk, there would have been no HyperCard, and HyperCard definitely succeeded in that goal to a significant degree.

It's a pity there's never been a modern reboot with the right factors aligned to continue that work.

https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

I think Decker is just wonderful, but it's retro. That isn't a criticism of it at all, that's what it wants to be and I don't think it should try to be something else.

But it isn't what I meant. A HyperCard reboot would be a modern GUI builder with a deck-of-cards drag-drop metaphor, deployable as desktop, browser, and mobile apps for any platform. Mobile poses some problems, particularly iOS, but I don't think those are unsurmountable.

Decker is a love letter to the HyperCard which was. But if HyperCard had survived as a product, today's version wouldn't look anything like that.

Decker runs natively on a variety of platforms as well as on web browsers, and it fully supports touch devices like tablets. It isn't designed with small cellphones in mind, but I'm told that it's quite usable on phones that include a stylus. Just as touch support has improved over time, I have some ideas for providing a degree of fluid layout in the future without onerous impositions on deck authoring.

Decker is not a carbon-copy of HyperCard frozen in the past; it's a continuously evolving platform with many interesting innovations and experimental ideas. It has a distinct aesthetic, but I see this as a strength rather than a weakness: "modern" just means "in fashion", and fashions are always in flux.

It's great work what you've done, and as I said, I have no criticism of it at all.

But it's more than a distinct aesthetic, it is a distinctly retro aesthetic. Modern means contemporary, more than it means fashionable (sometimes retro aesthetics are in fashion, after all).

But terminological nuance is not very important here. The fact remains that, as wonderful as it is, Decker is not what I meant, and I don't think you're trying to make it into that either. For one thing you'd need a rather large marketing budget.

But to be sure, I wish you all success, whatever that might mean to you. If that includes transforming Decker into something which looks and feels like HyperCard might today, if Jobs hadn't put it out to pasture when he did, then more power to you.

I like the ideas around the interface where physical objects are part of the UX, but I think putting everything into paper takes it too far.

Putting things on paper means you cannot share things outside of your immediate community which I think is one of the main advantages of computing and the internet.

Creating a place for physical community is great, making a UX which allows sharing that experience is great. Firewalling your ideas off from the rest of the world, not so great.

I could see a world where these communities are federated. Maybe your local computing community is connected to other locales as well as somewhere else which is far away (like we do today with sister cities).

I think the (interesting) output we see as the different UI is a side-effect of the actual research mentioned at the end of the video: how can we teach everyone how to do spatial programming, just like we teach everyone to write and calculate. The end result is not a finished product, but new knowledge about how to spread this new knowledge to everyone.

He worked on the Touch Bar for Apple so I guess ideas don't always work out.

I find the Touch Bar to be a brilliant idea, but the released execution didn't live up to the potential.

https://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/

https://pock.app

https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...

https://github.com/niw/HapticKey

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