Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
Why Hacker News recommends it
It is HN's go-to recommendation for the case that programming environments should give instant feedback, and it appears in nearly every thread on live coding, visual programming or developer tools.
What it is
Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.
Recommended by 12 HN commenters across 11 different months, 2013 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec bigsassy · 2014-06 · on “Introducing Swift”
Is this related to Bret Victor's stuff? My mind was blown when I saw this video 2 years ago, and I can't help but see similarities here: [this video]
Strong rec productionQA · 2014-07 · on “Ask HN: Favorite talks [video] on software development?”
Probably not exactly what you need, but as far as inspiration is concerned, it doesn't get much better than this: [this video] Check out Bret Victor's talks in general (worrydream.com). He is quite interesting.
Strong rec rpeden · 2018-02 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”
I think most here have already seen it, but I find that Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk[1] is one of the best I've seen. I re-watch it every so often to help prevent my thinking from falling into a rut. When developing software as a career, it's so easy to just fall into a pattern where you use the same tools and techniques over and over again. Watching this talk this talk inspires me to investigate alternate approaches to developing and delivering software. It's easy to think of software development as something that always need to involve code, and nothing but code. But watching this talk inspires me to go and try things like Node Red and Unreal Blueprints. In both cases, code is
Strong rec ignoramous · 2022-06 · on “Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?”
Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is even better (albeit it isn't only a product pitch): [this video]
Strong rec pedrovhb · 2024-01 · on “What I've learned about flow fields so far”
Nice! Playing around with the widget under the section "Experimenting with lines" I'm reminded of Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk [0] (an absolute must watch, if anyone hasn't yet). In particular, changing the smoothness reveals a sort of scaling effect that I'd probably never know about if not playing around with sliders and having it update in real time rather than setting individual values. Very interesting and beautiful! [0] [this video]
Recommends DanielRibeiro · 2015-11 · on “The Utopian UI Architect”
You may not consider him a genius. But Bret does have some pretty innovate ideas on Programming and Design (and more). Good examples: Inventing on Principle: [this video] The Humane Representation of Thought: [LINK]
Recommends bch · 2019-04 · on “Panic’s Next Editor”
Nice, but I think I can raise you. That talk mostly seemed pretty predictable (though I incorrectly guessed gfx via sixels[0], not a(nother) terminal emulator). If your interest was piqued with that parent video though, prepare to have your mind blown with this[1], who’s thesis maybe similar in the sense of “stop _just_ simply working”. Bernhardt seems to be saying don’t be afraid to take time and think deeply and “go deep”, while Victor is explicitly saying make it count by way of targeting with intention what’s important to you. A sort of “fight the good fight.” [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]
Recommends gervwyk · 2020-05 · on “Ask HN: Are React-like UI frameworks a fad or a genuine step forward?”
Bringing two concepts closer, especially visually will result in a better developer experience - Thus merging html and js into a single file, component, class / object and sequential logic was really the turning point to build more complex web apps. This reminds me of the excellent talk by bret victor [this video]