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Added a later note (medium article) to 2012-08-16-some-thoughts.md

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Chris Hodapp 2017-01-29 12:00:26 -05:00
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I just watched [Inventing on Principle](https://vimeo.com/36579366) from Bret Victor and found this entire talk incredibly interesting. Chris Granger's [post](http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---a-new-ide-concept/) on Light Table led me to this, and shortly after, I found the redesigned [Khan Academy CS course](http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs) which this inspired. Bret touched on something that basically anyone who's attempted to design anything has implicitly understood: **This feedback loop is the most essential part of the process.**
I reflected on this and on my own experiences, and decided on a few things:
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My beloved C language, for instance, gives some freedom to build a lot of constructs, but mainly those constructs that still map closely to assembly language and to hardware. C++ tries a little harder, but I feel like those constructs quickly hit the point of appalling, fragile ugliness. Languages like Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Scala, and probably Haskell (I don't know yet, I haven't attempted to master it) are fairly well unmatched in the flexibility they give you. However, in light of Bret's video, the way these are all meant to be programmed still can fall quite short.
I love [Context Free](http://www.contextfreeart.org/) as well. I like it because its relative speed combined with some marvelous simplicity gives me the ability to quickly put together complex fractalian/mathematical/algorithmic images. Normal behavior when I work with this program is to generate several hundred images in the course of an hour, refining each one from the last. Another big reason it appeals to me is that, due to its simplicity, I could fairly easily take the Context Free description of any of these images and turn it into some other algorithmic representation (such as a recursive function call to draw some primitives, written in something like [Processing](http://www.processing.org/) or [openFrameworks](http://www.openframeworks.cc/) or HTML5 Canvas or OpenGL).
*Later note, circa 2017:* Tobbe Gyllebring (@drunkcod)
in
[The Double Edged Sword of Faster Feedback](https://medium.com/@drunkcod/the-double-edged-sword-of-faster-feedback-1052bf360e7e#.c7o9fsuch) makes
some excellent points that I completely missed and that are very
relevant to everything here. On the overreliance on fast feedback
loops to the exclusion of more deliberate design and analysis, he
says, "Running an experiment requires you to have a theory. This is
not science. It’s a farce," which I rather like.