Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

Rui Oliveira · 339.1K views · 2012-02-22 · 54:20

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Recommended by 12 HN people across 11 months · HN mentions 2013–2025

Topics

GUI, HCI & interface history Testing, debugging & developer tools UX & UI design

What people said

pedrovhb · 2024-01 · Strong recommendation
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] [VIDEO]
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ignoramous · 2022-06 · Strong recommendation
Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is even better (albeit it isn't only a product pitch): [VIDEO]
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rpeden · 2018-02 · Strong recommendation
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 usually still involved, but they both offer a visual way of connecting components. I find it helpful to be able to visualize software this way so I can immediate understand how data flows through the application. [1] [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Rui Oliveira, played through YouTube.

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