Bret has written an amazing article, but the world he inhabits is soooooooooo far away I can't ever imagine getting there in my lifetime.True, he doesn't seem afraid to take big leaps. Brilliant, visionary essay. But I don't think it's unrealistic. In my day to day (game dev) I spent very little time optimizing (and very rarely need to write any sort of bit shifting), but instead a huge chunk of development is spent slingshotting variables through loops into abstracted rendering directives. The hardest part in my job is by far understanding and visualizing program flows in my head. From the essay:
Wait. Wait a minute. Were you trying to answer those questions by doing arithmetic in your head? The computer somehow drew that picture, so the computer must have calculated all those scaleFactors itself. Are you seriously recalculating them in your head?
Sadly, yes, very often I am. Depending on the mood I also use a convoluted combination of notebook + pencil, breakpoints, printf statements, and/or isolating the problem by working on a separate program with the problem simplified. And having aids - like some of the great solutions suggested like the timeline and other state/flow displays - would give me tremendous gain today, if they could be integrated in my toolset. I'll give you that I imagine it being quite a bit more challenging technically to make it work with my C/C++/Objective-C environment, but with other more dynamic languages - like Javascript or as suggested: Clojure - I imagine it to be much easier.
This article is by the way, most likely the best argument I've heard so far for me to move to a higher level language. I like how Bret Victor talks about language (and API - see the autocomplete argument) choices as enablers to better environments; I think we instead usually think of language choice as something that mitigates how hard this work is to begin with with the tools we have (see the time and energy we spend in in this community on language choice). If I had access to tools offering this level of abstraction but had to adopt a language that I didn't particularly like, I think the latter would then become be the least of my concerns.