What's next
Live coding, end-user programming, direct manipulation, and the question Bret Victor keeps asking: is this really it?
Why, after all this time, do we still program by typing lines of text into files, compiling them, running them, and then squinting at the output to imagine what went wrong? It's a fair question, and it's the one this topic keeps asking.
The discomfort has a long pedigree. Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad gave us direct manipulation in 1963. The REPL and Smalltalk's live image collapsed the gap between writing a program and running it. The spreadsheet quietly became the most successful end-user programming environment ever built. Each pointed toward a future where instructing a computer is more immediate, more visible, and more widely shared.
In our own time, Bret Victor has become the sharpest voice for that future — arguing in Inventing on Principle that creators need an immediate connection to what they make, and warning, in character as a 1973 engineer, that the real danger is to forget our conventions were ever choices. His work on live programming and on computing you can inhabit physically (Dynamicland) pushes past the glass rectangle entirely.
This topic is about taking that dissatisfaction seriously — and about the possibility that the most important programming ideas haven't been invented yet.