Brett Victor is one of my spirit animals

Bret Victor invents tools that enable developers to understand and create. From Apple to Al Gore his work always impresses, definitely check out his Inventing on Principle talk.

In The Future of Programming, Bret looks at the promising future of programming as it presented itself in 1973 and what we should expect it to be 40 years later, i.e., today. A lot of things that seemed crazy (GUI, Prolog, Smalltak, the Internet) became reality but we might be still held back today by the same skepticism over what constitutes programming as in 1973. At the same time, engineering seems to have carried us a lot farther than Bret Victor is willing to admit. Victor advocates four paradigm shifts to move us back to the future:

1. from coding to direct manipulation of data
2. from procedures to goals and constraints
3. from programs as text dump to spatial representations
4. from sequential to parallel programs

And I couldn't agree more, do yourself a favor and watch this lecture.