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slifin • today at 3:38 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I hate that in our industry we refuse to operationalise reverse debuggers

"I never understood the code. You think it works a certain way, until you find out that it doesn't."

Bret Victor made a talk called "seeing spaces" in 2014 that should have woken up this whole industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klTjiXjqHrQ

He emphasizes that without the ability to see inside what is being built, creators often fall into "non-scientific thinking" (14:42), moving away from deep understanding and instead "blindly following recipes, from superstitions and rules of thumb" (14:47-14:51).

The worse is performance problems I've had engineers say some bizzaro things when discussing performance — we have the tools you can just measure the answer - we don't need to waste our time guessing


Replies

xpct • today at 3:52 PM

Thank you for sharing :) good food for thought

daveguy • today at 8:07 PM

Thank you!! I saw this video about a decade ago, couldn't remember where it came from, and was having trouble finding it again! Bret Victor is an HCI juggernaut. From this info, here are some other links:

his website: https://worrydream.com/

his page for learnable programming: https://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

There was a programming environment closely related to his work that was a kind of visual database. But it may not have been developed by him / his lab. I don't see any obvious links to it on his website.