Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as the best demonstration of why instant feedback matters in programming tools.
What it is
Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2015 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jdiez17 · 2015-11 · on “Writing code doesn't mix well with oration”
Bret Victor's talks are a counter example to this. His live programming in this[1] talk is nothing short of mind blowing. [1] [this video]
Strong rec ripley12 · 2024-11 · on “Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1”
I absolutely care about things that take hundreds of milliseconds for my builds. The faster I can build, the faster I can iteratively try new things things out. The goal should be to be able to see changes instantly after you make them, and Tailwind is usually just 1 part of a build pipeline. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is probably the best demonstration of why this matters; in the first 10 minutes he shows a very concrete example of an insight that would not have occurred without instant feedback [this video]
Cites swyx · 2021-09 · on “Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development”
That landing page looks right out of Bret Victor's time travel demos ( [this video] , or [LINK] ). Communicates the value instantly. Incredibly well done! IMO the most time consuming issue in triaging bug reports is reproducing them. Replay definitively solves the "can't repro this" problem.
Cites NiceWayToDoIT · 2021-09 · on “Show HN: Time travel debugger for web development”
Dan Abramov 2015 [LINK] But there was one earlier presentation I cannot find it, guy was showing live debugging of the video game. Not sure is it TED or one of conferences ... Edit: This is it: Bred Victor: [this video] 2013 Future of programming [LINK]
Cites flyaway123 · 2022-08 · on “Programming breakthroughs we need”
A lot of the thought process here seems to move into Bret Victor's talk on 'Inventing on Principle'[0] [0] [this video]