> 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.