What are you up to these days Chris? And the obligatory question, what is your take on the article/why post?

I piled standout quotes below.

I think a big takeaway from the intersection of Bret Victor, Alan Kay, Jim Hollan and the ink&switch folks and your work is that the right dynamic interface can be the "place we live in" on the computer.

Victor shows a history of interactive direct manipulation interfaces, live environments where explorations of models or the creation of art go hand in hand with everything else related to that task: data input, explicit (programmatic) requirements and the visual output.

Hollan and ink&switch show the environment (ZUIs, canvas) can contain everything for doing work, the code alongside any manipulation of the viewport that can be conceived. Tools infinitely more advanced than Microsoft OneNote and designed 40 years ago.

From what I know about your work, I see another take on the environment I want to live in on the computer. I dont understand why I would want to lose power by stepping away from my language/interpreter/compiler/repl into a GUI or some portal when I can bring whatever it is which is nice about GUIs or portals into my dynamic computing environment. I very much want a personal DSL or set of DSLs for what I do on the computer, and I want to be able to hook into anything ala middle mouse button in plan9.

The superior alternative to walled gardens and this absurd world of bloat and 'feature loss' (for lack of a better term for software engineering's enthusiastic rejection of history) seems to be known, and facets of it advocated by you and these others. It seems clear that "using the computer" needs to return to "programming the computer" and that to achieve that we need to fundamentally change "programming the computer" to be a more communicative activity, to foster a better relationship between the computer and the user.

Where is this work being done now? VPRI shut down 2 years ago, Dynamicland seems to be on hiatus? I am inspired most these days by indie developers who write their own tools and build wild looking knowledge engines or what they sometimes call "trackers."[1] And of course the histories and papers put forward by the above and their predecessors. And I play with my own, building an environment where I can write, draw, code, execute and interact with it all. I see no existing product which approaches what I want.

> Everyone is busy building stuff for right now, today, rarely for tomorrow.

> Even when efficient solutions have been known for ages, we still struggle with the same problems: package management, build systems, compilers, language design, IDEs.

> You need to occasionally throw stuff away and replace it with better stuff.

> Business won’t care Neither will users. They are only learned to expect what we can provide.

> There’s no competition either. Everybody is building the same slow, bloated, unreliable products.

> The only thing required is not building on top of a huge pile of crap that modern toolchain is.

> I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.

[1]: https://webring.xxiivv.com