But does he ship?
Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvenimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea.
The working code for the Nile viewer presented is on GitHub:
Why does that matter?
A bunch of ideas that sound great in theory are just that, it is only by surviving the crucible of the real world that ideas are validated and truly tested. When Guy Steele and James Gosling were the only software developers in the world who could program in Java, every Java program was a masterpiece. It is only once the tool was placed in the hands of mere mortals that its flaws were truly known.
Walk around a good gallery. There are a pretty good number of pieces entitled "Study #3", or something of that sort. An artist is playing around with a tool, or a technique, trying to figure out something new.
Piano music is probably where this concept gets the most attention. Many études, such as those by Chopin, are among the most significant musical works of the era.
In another talk Bret claims that you basically cannot do visual art/design without immediate feedback. I was wondering how he thought people that create metal sculptures via welding, or carve marble, possibly work. It's just trivially wrong to assert you need that immediate feeback, and calls all of the reasoning into question.
also Beethoven wrote down his complex music quite often w/o using the instrument as he heard it in his mind...
You can't play around with a tool or technique without actually producing something. You can talk about how a 47.3% incline on the brush gives the optimal result all day long, but it's the artist that actually paints that matters.
Van Gogh didn't ship.
Because I want to play with his Drawing Dynamic Viz demo. http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend...
The fact that you point "shipping" as a part of this discussion just shows how much he's right.