Future of Coding Magic Ink by Bret Victor
Information Software Dominates
- Most software is information software aimed at facilitating learning rather than just manipulation or communication.
- Interfaces should prioritize rich, context-sensitive visual information over excessive interactivity.
Poor Interfaces in 2006
- In 2006, software interfaces relied heavily on primitive, context-insensitive input elements.
- Rich, dynamic widgets like calendar pickers were not common, limiting efficient information presentation.
Movie Showtime Visualization Example
- Brett Victor proposed a movie showtime visualization enabling users to glance and answer questions without interaction.
- This contrasts starkly with typical web apps requiring multiple clicks to find relevant showtime information.
Before the time-travelling talks, the programmable rooms, the ladders and rocket launchers, we had the first real Bret Victor essay: Magic Ink. It set the stage for Bret's later explorations, breaking down the very idea of "software" into a few key pieces and interrogating them with his distinct focus, then clearly demoing a way we could all just do it better. All of Bret's works feel simultaneously like an anguished cry and a call to arms, and this essay is no exception.
For the next episode, we're reading Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur, with a little bit of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind thrown in for good measure.
Links
Four Hundred of the most Chart-Topping Thoughts of All Time:
Paper Programs by JP Posma was inspired by Dynamicland.
"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." from Halt and Catch Fire
Charticulator is Microsoft Research's take on a _Drawing Dynamic Visualizations_-esq tool.
Jimmy's Fender Jazz bass looks like this, but red, but like a decade older, but like $600 at the time.
We could probably post parts of this episode as Boyfriend Roleplay on YouTube.
Fitts's Law is but one thing we've learned about the industrial design aspect of building good software.
The Witness is a game where communicating ideas through (essentially) graphic design is the whole entire point of the game. If you haven't played it, know that it comes highly recommended by plenty of folks in the community.
A "red letter Bible" is a Bible in which the words spoken by Jesus are colored red, to make them easier to identify.
Toph Tucker has a pretty cool personal website. It's rare to see these sorts of sites nowadays, and they're always made by adventuresome programmers, trendy design agencies, or their clients. In the Flash era, it felt like everyone had a website like this, for better and for worse.
tldraw is a beautiful little browser-based drawing tool by Steve Ruiz. What few things it does, it does exceptionally well.
John while Henry had had had had had had had had had been my preference.
#devlog-together is the channel on our Future of Coding slack community where members post small, frequent updates about what they're working on.
The (Not Boring) apps are arguably a counterpoint to Bret's theses about information apps and harmful interaction, where the interaction and graphic design are balanced against being maximally-informative, toward being silly and superfluous, to great effect.
Did you know there's a hobby horse, but also a hobby horse? I didn't!
There are a few examples of folks doing FoC work that, in Ivan's view, align well with the values Bret outlines in Magic Ink:
- Szymon Kaliski's projects for Ink & Switch, summarized in his Strange Loop talk, Programmable Ink.
- Mock Mechanics is an environment for building mechanisms by Felipe Reigosa.
- PANE by Josh Horowitz inverts the usual node-wire programming pattern by putting data in the nodes and data transformation in the wires.
Robot Odyssey was a 1984 game for the Apple II (and some other, lesser systems) in which players would go inside various robots to reprogram them.
Music featured in this episode:
- Wash Machine, from the unfinished 2014 album Sneaky Dances
- Shaun's Amaj Rebirth, created in November 2022 for a friend named — you guessed it — Shaun.
Hey! Send us questions we can answer on the show. Like, "How do you keep bread warm?" Or, "What's so great about concatenative languages?" We'll answer them. Send them here:
futureofcoding.org/episodes/060
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