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This has a nice little interactive visualization showing the road so far and how much more we have to go.

The long and the short of it seems to be that unless we collectively manage to pull off massive decarbonisation very soon, we're probably going to blow past the 2C threshold which is a bad outcome for everyone

My personal philosophy is that the point of writing is to convey information. Consequently, I try to write as clearly and simply as possible to make what I'm saying easy to understand. I gave the first draft of my thesis to my advisor and... he told me my writing was too simple. I had to use more complex words and sentences, and excess repetition (his exact words were "say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you just said").

Along the same lines, my thesis work was dependent on another researcher's work so I had to follow the papers he was putting out. His writing was incredibly dense with very complex sentence structures which sometimes took several minutes to unravel. From his name, I could tell he was Indian so I figured he wasn't fluent in English or something. I finally got to meet him and... his English was perfect and when he spoke about his work it was incredibly easy to follow. I asked him why his writing was so inscrutable. He said he wrote like that because it was expected of him when publishing, and because it made him sound more intelligent.

No thank you. One of the best papers I came across during my research was Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication. It is easy to read and understand, yet concise and detailed. It's so easy to follow I've given copies of it to co-workers who were attempting to solve problems related to or similar to information theory, but who weren't trained in information theory. And they've all been able to digest it in one or two nights of bedtime reading. That is how knowledge should be passed.

And we know from experience that WHENEVER somebody uses terms like "language <XYZ> is the future", it is inevitably baseless speculation, and often rests on the false belief that some single programming language, or any single technology for that matter, can actually be the "best" one.

Brooks said it best, There is No Silver Bullet

Consider it a "video demonstration" then, and consider that it demonstrates some curious weaknesses in the language. (I watched the DNA strand video.)

I don't like subroutine names that include something that looks like a parameter, so things like rotatex and rotatey set me on edge a bit. It gets worse when this is inconsistent, and you see a subroutine called vertical_align for vertical alignment, where the seeming parameter (vertical) is now before the generic (align), and separated by an underscore instead of run together. Not only is this an internal inconsistency, but it's inconsistent with English, as "align" is a verb, and we would put in an adverb "vertically" after the verb normally. And then it gets worse again, as the command for horizontal alignment is... "align".

The grammatical inconsistency continues with other commands/subroutines taking on names with no verb component at all (eg the command color, with no verb or assignment operator.

I'm really not happy with the way pattern matching is used as overloading:

dna_base_color 0 -> color "red"
dna_base_color 1 -> color "blue" ...

rather than a single structure with explicit choices, eg

dna_base_color :
0 -> color "red"
| 1 -> color "blue" ...

...because you can get yourself in a mess if you split it up into different parts of the code and accidentally overwrite stuff.

I'm completely baffled why the whole demo recreates the shapes for every single redraw frame rather than keeping them as persistent objects (which necessitates adding a random seed in order to fake them being persistent by pulling up the same colours each time.

(The demo also demonstrates the whole potential of doing too much and drowning yourself in flash -- notice how DNA letter codes are added, then promptly disappear in a black-on-black clash and are forgotten about.)

But the worst part is the way these rotations and coloring statements create a hidden state that affects things below in an opaque manner... and I'm not even sure it might not effect stuff above it.

There's a remarkable similarity between everything I've just said and the criticisms I've read of processing/processing.js (eg Bret Victor's opinions on Khan Academy's coding tutorials), so I'm guessing this was very heavily inspired by Processing's 2D canvasses....

CS is a subfield of mathematics. It's useful in software and computer engineering, but it's the engineering field you should be talking about, not a subfield of what is, in essence, an art. And yes, I do agree with Lockhart. Wholeheartedly.

The live REPL reminds me of Bret Victor, who used to work for apple.
http://worrydream.com/Apple/

I hope they take advantage of some of his ideas?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There is a very cool talk on this very subject at: http://worrydream.com/dbx/ Bret Victor comes out dressed like he is in the 1960s and talks about the "future of programming" -- in other words he is speaking like it is 1972 or something and talk about what programming in 2014 should look like. In so doing, he effectively shows us how far off we drifted from what programming could be today. In the talk, Bret Victor points out that one of the reasons programming doesn't evolve as it should is because so many programmers have the attitude ShanghaiBill has and they resist change. We get so full of what programming "is" that we can't see what it could be. BTW, ShanghaiBill, what does failing over the last 30 years have to do with today? Broadast.com failed to bring streaming video to the mainstream in 1999... does that mean no one should ever try streaming media on the Internet again?

It depends on which level of "education" you are talking about because it sure the hell isn't critical thinking these days!

"A Mathematician's Lament"
http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf

and

"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

Education comes from the latin word "Educare" which means "To draw out that which lies within" not the "fill up with useless facts" paradigm that the current establishment loves.

--
I have professionally shipped games on DS, PS1, PS2, PS3, PC, and Wii.

Yes, but you could have a language that has simple I/O and isn't utterly bereft of good coding principles.

And Processing is an absolute car-crash. The basic principle is sound, but the execution was woeful. Brett Victor's detailed slating of Processing.js covers a lot of the inconsistencies and woolly thinking in the model.

http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf

Read Brett Victor's A Brief Rant on the Future of Interactive Design if you want to understand why haptic feedback designs are superior.

I also bet that you only read the summary.
http://worrydream.com/dbx/

The key point of the parent article was made back in 2011, and a bit more clearly, by Bret Victor in his article "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design".

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

It's a great piece.

Another example: I once stepped in as a swim coach for kids, and didn't have any stopwatch, so I downloaded an app for my smartphone. Didn't work. The operation of a stopwatch requires you to press a button with your thumb while your eyes are focused on something else. Having to look at the screen to see where that button is defeats its purpose. A button is at least one order of magnitude more accurate in this case.

Touchscreens are great when you can reasonably assume that the user's full concentration will be at the screen. Other times, buttons are far better. Buttons have the additional advantage of staying in the same place, which means you can usually find it by feeling your way forward. This can work extremely well, for our brains are wired to remember certain oft-repeated movements of the fingers. A guitar player doesn't have to look at the strings to play, and you can probably tie your shoelace without looking.

Here's an excellent article on the future of interactive tools: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

Bret does have a lot of that kind of thing on his website.

http://worrydream.com/

Lots of interesting stuff there. But as far as I can see the topic and the demos of this particular presentation haven't made their way on to his web site yet.

The original article video author has a really good example of this approach. Enjoy!

And for those decrying the use of video, you'll definitely want to check out Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction by the same author: http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

It's a big wall of text with interactive javascript examples and no video.

Unless somebody wants to give a better executive summary, there's no way I'm weeding through an hour of video.

That's your loss. The guy behind these ideas is, IMHO, one of the most interesting researchers in the field of computing today. Go ahead and check out Bret Victor's home page directly if you don't like the blogspam link. He has many other ideas about the interplay between visualisation, mathematics, and software development.

There are way too many people in this Slashdot discussion whose only contribution is either "TL;DW" or "it's a dumb idea that only applies to GUIs". Those people obviously haven't understood the fundamental ideas that Bret is suggesting, and I suspect didn't even bother to watch the whole presentation before diving in and criticising. It's sad.

Genuinely interesting and innovative ideas are rarely conveyed in 140 characters, or in a three-paragraph echo chamber blog post with 5 Google Ads attached. You have to invest a little of your own time if you want to do anything worthwhile. I recommend that you do invest some of your own time in studying this guy's work if you're at all interested in what's wrong with maths and/or software development today and some ways we might improve it. Or you could just spend the same hour reading another five troll blog posts about things like whether it's the year of Linux on the desktop yet and then getting involved in the inevitable more-heat-than-light comment threads, I suppose.

Unless somebody wants to give a better executive summary, there's no way I'm weeding through an hour of video.

That's your loss. The guy behind these ideas is, IMHO, one of the most interesting researchers in the field of computing today. Go ahead and check out Bret Victor's home page directly if you don't like the blogspam link. He has many other ideas about the interplay between visualisation, mathematics, and software development.

There are way too many people in this Slashdot discussion whose only contribution is either "TL;DW" or "it's a dumb idea that only applies to GUIs". Those people obviously haven't understood the fundamental ideas that Bret is suggesting, and I suspect didn't even bother to watch the whole presentation before diving in and criticising. It's sad.

Genuinely interesting and innovative ideas are rarely conveyed in 140 characters, or in a three-paragraph echo chamber blog post with 5 Google Ads attached. You have to invest a little of your own time if you want to do anything worthwhile. I recommend that you do invest some of your own time in studying this guy's work if you're at all interested in what's wrong with maths and/or software development today and some ways we might improve it. Or you could just spend the same hour reading another five troll blog posts about things like whether it's the year of Linux on the desktop yet and then getting involved in the inevitable more-heat-than-light comment threads, I suppose.

Unless somebody wants to give a better executive summary, there's no way I'm weeding through an hour of video.

That's your loss. The guy behind these ideas is, IMHO, one of the most interesting researchers in the field of computing today. Go ahead and check out Bret Victor's home page directly if you don't like the blogspam link. He has many other ideas about the interplay between visualisation, mathematics, and software development.

There are way too many people in this Slashdot discussion whose only contribution is either "TL;DW" or "it's a dumb idea that only applies to GUIs". Those people obviously haven't understood the fundamental ideas that Bret is suggesting, and I suspect didn't even bother to watch the whole presentation before diving in and criticising. It's sad.

Genuinely interesting and innovative ideas are rarely conveyed in 140 characters, or in a three-paragraph echo chamber blog post with 5 Google Ads attached. You have to invest a little of your own time if you want to do anything worthwhile. I recommend that you do invest some of your own time in studying this guy's work if you're at all interested in what's wrong with maths and/or software development today and some ways we might improve it. Or you could just spend the same hour reading another five troll blog posts about things like whether it's the year of Linux on the desktop yet and then getting involved in the inevitable more-heat-than-light comment threads, I suppose.

Unless somebody wants to give a better executive summary, there's no way I'm weeding through an hour of video.

That's your loss. The guy behind these ideas is, IMHO, one of the most interesting researchers in the field of computing today. Go ahead and check out Bret Victor's home page directly if you don't like the blogspam link. He has many other ideas about the interplay between visualisation, mathematics, and software development.

There are way too many people in this Slashdot discussion whose only contribution is either "TL;DW" or "it's a dumb idea that only applies to GUIs". Those people obviously haven't understood the fundamental ideas that Bret is suggesting, and I suspect didn't even bother to watch the whole presentation before diving in and criticising. It's sad.

Genuinely interesting and innovative ideas are rarely conveyed in 140 characters, or in a three-paragraph echo chamber blog post with 5 Google Ads attached. You have to invest a little of your own time if you want to do anything worthwhile. I recommend that you do invest some of your own time in studying this guy's work if you're at all interested in what's wrong with maths and/or software development today and some ways we might improve it. Or you could just spend the same hour reading another five troll blog posts about things like whether it's the year of Linux on the desktop yet and then getting involved in the inevitable more-heat-than-light comment threads, I suppose.

Because loads of people here are buying into the nonsense that touchscreens are so awesome and the future of everything.

you should read Bret Victor's Magic Ink essay. He goes about breaking this fill-submit-wait-for-return paradigm we currently have for everything on the web, proposing instead designs that answer to user parameters more quickly. His flight ticket UI example is wonderful, but so far I haven't seen any implementation of that.

Alligator Eggs is a fun approach to the lambda calculus.

Ditto. Every single airline ticketing system I've used so far sucks beyond imagination.

I would love to see them implementing a interface like the one suggested in this article. That would simply make other sites obsolete.

Don't spoil the kid with imperative programming yet. Try Alligator Eggs.

In this section in particular -- past the comic -- there is an example of a redesign.

Raise your hand if you would rather try to point at a specific location on a map than simply choose it for a list.

And you know what? By the time you're using this form, you know the date, as text. It's going to be quicker and simpler to enter it via the dropdowns -- even quicker if you can simply type. The calendar widget only helps if it can show me events I've already placed on a calendar -- otherwise, there's no point.

I don't know if that's a representative sample, but it makes me very reluctant to read the rest of the paper.

Also, for all your developers, do you have a designer? UI development = graphic design + industrial/interaction design. Read Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

That is generally a bad idea. Interaction should be considered as a compromise if not other solution can be found, not as a good idea in itself. Every time users have to interact with your application, a certain amount of users will fail. If you can show every information the user has to know without him interacting with your application, you've killed that source of errors.

You should read this paper on why interaction is bad, and how interaction can be avoided.

Quote:

The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into "Human-Computer Interaction." In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on "interaction" may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called "information software," I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users' goals can be better satisfied through other means.

The BART Widget for Dashboard went through the same problem.