This project is an attempt to replicate and extend the demo Bret Victor gave in his talk "Inventing on Principal"
A core realization he shows us is that his principal led him to see the current way we program computers as a relic from earlier ages. From punch card programming, we have a true disconnect. Where the program must be entirely realized in the mind of the programmer, encoded into a series of punch cards, loaded into a computer, evaluated, and only then can the programmer examine the output. From there, we can think of how the development of languages proceeded and is still influenced by this and pervades our thinking. This is a core concept Bret was led to discover by his principal. We consider the Read-Eval-Print-Loop to be some sort of ultimate goal. Indeed, this kind of tooling can reduce the time between creation and feedback, but Bret goes further and shows how we can reimagine different ways of programming if we start and looking at how our tools influence the creative process.
As programmers, we are bound by the tools and languages we use. Many of the decisions around the design of these were made in different computing eras. Earlier eras dealt with resource constraints and designed their systems around these. So many of these constraints affected the way we created. Disk space, network bandwidth, CPU, GPU, caching, multiple cores, high resoultion display. All have fundamentally changed over the past decades.
At this point, let me be clear in my understanding. Bret's ultimate goal was not to demo his software, it was to show how the principal Bret had created for himself, "creators need an immediate connection to what they are creating" led him to reimagine interactions programmers have with computers. The ultimate goal of Bret's demos were not to show off the program used in the demo, but to demonstrate how his principal led him to create that tool. I think that's why he (as far as I know) hasn't released his tools. They aren't the point. They're just entralling demos.
That being said, those demos had such a high factor and I can't help but give it a shot at figuring out how to duplicate what he did in those tools.
This demo shows off an IDE which has an immediate connection to what is being rendered. Bret demonstrates creating a scene in a JavaScript canvas.
The essential aspect of this code is to have the render of the code happen as the code is being written.
With JavaScript, we are dealing with interpreted code. We are still constrained by the Code-Reload-Examine loop. In order to remove the "Reload" aspect of this, we should think of compilation as a coninuous act, not as an event we trigger. This is where we can be wasteful with CPU in order to realize a new way to interaction. Being able to make this core element happen, we can reimagine an animation loop running which constantly re-renders our code. Part of Bret's demo lead to this way of thinking very easily.
- Code completion preview
- Integer Slider
- Color picker