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Comment by gfunk911 | Hacker News Reader

Couple random thoughts:

1. Is Bret Victor now the Linus of cutting-edge programming environments?

2. I don't have enough experience with Light Table or the Khan Academy environment to know whether Khan is just a first step on the way to something like Bret's vision, or more of a diversion. I was fairly impressed with the Khan env in my limited time with it.

3. I HATE telling people they shouldn't speak their mind and/or say what they think is the truth, and I don't think Bret shouldn't have written anything. But it's difficult not to seem ungracious. Josh Resig clearly knows what he's doing, at least in the general sense, and he was gushing with praise for Bret, while this reply basically says John did everything wrong.

If Bret feels that way, I truly believe he should say it, but that doesn't make it fun. This is the essay equivalent of cringe humor I guess. Hilarious/Informative while making you feel bad.

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1. I think Victor is the Engelbart of our generation

2. The Academy's program just makes "guess and check" easier, it does not fundamentally present additional information (intermediary computational state) to the user

3. He said that he had to respond because he was cited as the inspiration. It is as if I said "this post is inspired by gfunk911" and then filled it with things that you disagree with.

> 1. Is Bret Victor now the Linus of cutting-edge programming environments?

Linus actually implements his solutions to things that he rants about, and releases his code, so that analogy isn't quite right. Bret gives us nice big-picture ideas and leaves the implementation for others.

I think many of the specific ideas mentioned by Bret will quickly fall apart when trying to actually implement something non-trivial. But that's okay, it's useful to have a really inspiring big-picture vision.

Light Table should be an interesting implementation to follow then. It seems to be guided by many of big-picture ideas of Bret Victor but at the same time has to somehow make money as a real product.

Or you could check out his site and notice "tangle - explorable explanations made easy", which is a Javascript library that implements the very sorts of interactions he's talking about.

http://worrydream.com/#!/Tangle

Not to take away from Bret's ideas, because they're great, but here are my responses.

1. I'd say that there's a significant difference between Bret and Linus. Specifically, when Linus believes that developers need better tools, we get git. When Bret believes developers need better tools, we get... blog posts and videos showing faked functionality. Now, that's not to say this won't change in the future. But, as of right now, Bret is starting to look like an "idea guy" in a world of "doers."

3. The reason I'm irked by this post is that I'm under the impression that Bret was specifically asked by Khan Academy to consult on the project (I'm under this impression because this is what I was told). He chose not to consult. So, all of these things he's pointing out now, he had the opportunity to affect them and change them before they were ever released to the public. He had the opportunity to completely revolutionize how new developers learn and he chose to turn away from it. If he's so passionate about the topic, why would he turn it down? Regardless of the reason, to me, it's a "speak now or forever hold your peace." He had the chance to speak, he chose not to, turning around after the fact and saying what it could have been is him doing too little too late.

Linus needs his RMS and vice versa. Don't frame this as 'empty ideas' vs 'noble industry'. Both are necessary.

There are many reasons, none of which need to be justified to the public, as to why a person may turn down an opportunity.

His article made a short criticism of KA missing the forest for the trees and then provided a very long and detailed analysis of ways to improve it. For free. So everyone benefits.

I suspect the videos in his article were not dummies, mocks or faked, but actual working code. If you visit his website you will see a mind numbing amount of examples and demonstrations in the same vein and length as the article. The effort required to fake these would be truly enormous. Again, his reasons for not releasing code don't need to be justified to us.

I don't see this as ungracious. It's not as if he's saying Khan Academy went in the wrong direction. He's just noting improvements that could be made on their current environment. Every new "beginner" programming environment that I've seen has similar flaws. Bret's just pointing them out.

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