Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?
I don't think it will ever happen except for toy projects. If you're manipulating some small list of 10-20 objects and those object have some kind of useful visual representation then for some small use case you can possibly, maybe, design a system that could do what's shown in the demos. I'm skeptical that it scales to more complex problems with more complex data.Bret Victor himself has made zero headway. And no, Dynamicland is not it. Dynamicland is still coded in text with no visual representation itself.Other examples always show the simplest stuff. A flappy bird demo. A simple recursive tree. A few houses made of 2-3 rectangles and a triangle. Etc...To be even more pessimistic, AFAICT, if you find a single example you'll find that even the creators of the example have abandoned it. They aren't using it in their own projects. They made it, made some simple demos, realized it didn't really fit anything except simple demos, and went back to coding in text.I'm not trying to be dismissive. I'd love to be proven wrong. I too was inspired when I first read his articles. But, the more I thought about it the more futile it seemed. The stuff I work on has too many moving parts to display any kind of useful representation in a reasonable amount of time.What I can imagine is better debuggers with plugins for visualizers and manipulators. C# shipped with its property control that you could point at a class and it would magically made it editable. You could then write a custom UI for any time and it would show up in the property control (for example a color editor). I'd like to see more of that in debuggers. Especially if one of the more popular languages made it a core feature of their most popular debugger so that it became common for library writers to include debug time visualizersEven then though, it's not clear to me how often it would be useful.