Warning: recent history lesson ahead.

> One core idea embedded in all of Bret's work is that learning happens best when students are able to explore multiple representations of a idea or aspects of an environment simultaneously. The more quickly one representation changes in reaction to the other, the stronger the learning feedback loop, and the more quickly the student builds an accurate mental model of how the thing they're interacting with works.

Bret Victor's work brings a lot of visibility to this field, but he was hardly the first one; e.g. [1]. And more to the point, I wasn't the first one either; I believe Christopher Hancock [2] was, but even that is controversial if we begin to talk about visual languages all the way from Sutherland's SketchPad, and Jonathan's work on subtext [6] was a big inspiration to my own. And even I was inspired by some piece of software called SlideShow [4].

> So, WRT your point, it's not about the fact that the documents are interactive, but that they're "reactive." The interactive bits are all related to each other, and when one part changes all the other parts change with it, in real-time. There's something in this immediacy that even the slightest delay destroys.

50 milliseconds is the max, ideally you want < 20 ms (see [1], keep in mind 15 ms is your standard frame delay).

> But, well, he's taken it to a whole 'nother level. He's actively exploring this idea on multiple fronts, from reactive documents to reactive programming environments, and shitting gold all around town.

He is definitely a great communicator! But some of us get a bit irked by the fanboys that weren't around 8 years ago when we started this line of work (when I gave my Live Programming talk in Montreal, Ralph Johnson [5] said my work wasn't anything new! But he did the same thing for my paper I presented in Nantes the previous year).

> Every time he publishes something it takes months for people to react, absorb, and respond. See, e.g., http://www.lighttable.com/

Been there done that. Incidentally, it takes me around 5 or 6 years on average to absorb any of Conal Elliott's [3] papers.

> Even if you don't think what he's doing is particularly special, there's something about the way he does it that causes big waves every time he publishes something.

I love the way he communicates and the way he applies ideas in coherent meaningful designs. He really is a great designer. I just can't handle the gushing fan boys who are not curious enough to look at the bigger world of work in this area.

Bib:

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1793... (living it up with a live programming language circa 2007. Best viewed in Acrobat with Quicktime installed to see the embedded movies, I should get around to doing a webpage someday...)

[2] http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch-phd.pdf (2003, best dissertation ever, most of Bret's work on learnable computing seems like a modernized version of what Christopher presented here, if you like liveness in programming read chapter 6)

[3] http://conal.net/blog/ (one of the inventors of FRP, has revolutionary ideas often)

[4] http://docs.racket-lang.org/slideshow/index.html (Matthew Flatt gave his job talk using this, he was editing the code for his slides in real time, not quite live, but it was definitely cool in 1999)

[5] http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView (anything that I do apparently has already been done in Smalltalk :) )

[6] http://subtextual.org/ (lots of crazy cool ideas in that language)