Bret Victor The Future of Programming
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN treats it as a classic, near-mandatory talk on how programming tools and paradigms stagnated and which older ideas deserve revival.
What it is
Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.
Recommended by 12 HN commenters across 11 different months, 2017 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec itsyogesh · 2017-01 · on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”
Bret Victor is amazing. I saw his video about the future of programming[0] and have been following him since then. [0] [this video]
Strong rec diegojromero · 2018-08 · on “Ask HN: What is the future of programming?”
'The future of Programming' by Bret Victor ( [this video] ). Seems a pun about OP title but it really is related with his/her question. Take a look and you will be amazed of how good (or revolutionary by our standards) some old technologies were.
Strong rec corysama · 2021-01 · on “The Great Software Stagnation”
Lots of cynic-cynics in here :) I'll stand up for the author. The lists in the article are not great, but I still agree with the sentiment. I recommend everyone watch Bret Victor's classic "The Future of Programming" [this video] Yes, we've had a trillion dollars invested in "How to run database servers at scale". And, we've had some incremental improvements to the C++ish language ecosystem. We've effectively replaced Perl with Python. That's nice. Deep Learning has been a major invention. Probably the most revolutionary I can think of in the past couple decades. But, what do I do in Visual Studio 2019 that is fundamentally different than what I was doing in Borland Turbo Pascal back on my old 28
Strong rec thangalin · 2021-01 · on “Why can't I write code inside my browser?”
Bret Victor's, "The Future of Programming" is illuminating. He walks through what "programming" means and how the concept of "programming" has shifted in little evolutionary leaps. [this video] "There can be a lot of resistance to new ways of working that require you to unlearn what you've already learned and think in new ways. ... And there can even be outright hostility." Programming Baduk used to involve expert systems. Now convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can hoist a computer to superhuman performance, even doing so without pre-programmed rules (see MuZero). We no longer "program" computers to play Go, chess, shogi, or even Atari games. Some people have difficulty keeping code structures
Strong rec ulkesh · 2023-07 · on “Bret Victor: Update July 2023”
If you haven't yet seen this video, please do: [this video] (Bret Victor The Future of Programming) This won't tell you who he is, exactly, but it does give insight into how he thinks. And it's a pretty great talk, in my opinion.
Recommends namuol · 2018-04 · on “You Can’t Do Data Science in a GUI”
Yes, healthy skepticism is good, but just because code (i.e. text files) is often the most _powerful_ or _flexible_ tool, doesn't mean it's always the best tool. We (programmers) are notoriously bad at advancing the tools in our field. For a brief history of this, watch "The Future of Programming" talk by Bret Victor: [this video]
Recommends veli_joza · 2018-06 · on “Programming Paradigms and Beyond [pdf]”
Good read. I feel the title should be "Teaching Programming Paradigms and Beyond" since the text assumes familiarity with complete CS landscape and comments on success of several teaching methods. I would recommend (also misleadingly titled) talk The Future of Programming by Bret Victor [1] which goes over some groundbreaking paradigms that have since become mostly forgotten. [1] [this video]
Recommends DeBraid · 2020-04 · on “Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?”
Related thread: `Ask HN: What's the best book on the early history of the Internet and/or Web?` [LINK] My previous reco: Not a book, but a great video via Steve Blank: [LINK] Also `Bret Victor The Future of Programming`, which is misleading as above is performance piece where title slide reads `1973` [this video]