Bret Victor The Future of Programming

Caption notes

In this 2013 talk, Bret Victor speaks as though it were 1973 to revisit four choices for programming: directly manipulating data, expressing goals and constraints, organizing information spatially, and using computation models suited to parallel activities. His deliberately retrospective “predictions” argue that hardware progress does not automatically change how people think, and that familiar programming media are not the only possibilities. The ending shifts attention from whether particular technologies become popular to whether people remain willing to invent programming models. This guide preserves the thought experiment. “Today” and “forty years from now” belong to its staged setting, not current conditions or guaranteed forecasts; the shown systems and historical anecdotes are not independently verified here.