2011 talk by Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle on Vimeo
Describes a certain way of living: Figuring out a principle and fighting for it (in his case, by inventing)
[02:00] Victor's principle: Creators need an immediate connection to what they create.
[05:30] Much of creation is discovery. Need to see the impacts of things you don't think to check on
[08:00] Bidirectional linking between "what does this code draw?" and "what code drew this?"
[08:50] Need to try ideas as you think of them
[13:00] Time-travelling debugger demo
[14:00] Little ladder of abstraction thing, showing trail of player character over time
[17:30] Complains about text, needing to run a computer in your head to understand code. Computer should just do it
[26:00] Two golden rules of information design: Show the data and show comparisons
[27:45] Why do we have these squiggly symbols? They're easy to draw with pencil and paper. Think bigger with dynamic media
[30:50] Flash doesn't know how to listen to my hand
[32:50] I dunno how many frames I waited, I just waited until it felt right
[33:50] Performing with my hands, like a musical instrument
[34:40] I always think about the millions of pieces locked in millions of heads. Many of these ideas will not emerge. [WO: Is this bad?]
[36:00] Not really excited by building things, having problems to solve. Sees the existence of the problems as a moral wrong, imperative to fix them, fight for principle
[38:12] Tesler's principle: No person should be trapped in a mode.
[38:50] Dominance of modal interfaces in Tesler's day. Many people just couldn't get comfortable
[40:00] Eventually invented Gypsy, a non-modal text editor with click+drag, cut+paste. Novice users got up and running much faster
[41:50] Tesler's entire identity is bound up in this idea of eliminating modes
[43:00] Tesler solved a problem that no one else saw as a problem, acknowledged a wrong that no one else did ("modes are just how computers work"). Closer to social activism than technical invention, a reaction against a specific cultural context
[44:57] Engelbart's goal: "to enable mankind to solve the world's urgent problems" Had a vision of knowledge workers with powerful tools that harnessed their collective knowledge. Computers incidental
[45:30] Kay's goal: "to amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization". Comparison to literacy, focused on children
[46:50] Stallman: "software must be free". Notoriously uncompromising
[50:00] Took a long time to develop my principles, needed to build up a large corpus of experience. An entire decade
[52:00] Lots of vague principles in industry e.g. simplicity, delight. Not enough to really get you anywhere