Thoughts/notes collected from various Bret Victor writings:
These representations weren't mere scientific "discoveries". Each of them essentially enabled all subsequent scientific breakthroughs thereafter. A powerful new form of representation affects everything, forever.
the author sees and manipulates indirect symbolic representations, and must imagine how they give rise to dynamic behavior
using representations to think powerfully about systems
a software system is an instance of a more general class of systems, so it's possible to write about "programming" using ideas that aren't actually specific to programming
it is only when people have a particular interest in something, such as knitting or baseball, or producing budgets or designing printers, or simulating the behavior of clown fish or honeybees, that they readily learn the formal languages and notations that describe the elements and relations of the system of interest
— A Small Matter of Programming - Bonnie Nardi
If an app doesn't implement the Pencil SDK it is nothing more than a precise mechanical finger. I'd love to be able to use the Pencil also in apps which don't support it. Allow me to annotate everything, everywhere and give the OS a sort of memory layer of all doodles I place everywhere. I'm currently typing this in Ulysess, my favourite writing app which doesn't make use of the Pencil. I'd love to highlight certain sentences, cross out certain things and make small doodles in the sideline.
Let me doodle OS-wide; on top of app icons, photos. I don't want to wait on the app developers for support of the Pencil. Adding an annotation layer to iOS itself would turn this iPad into a true "bicycle for the mind".
If I mark up a physical book then later flip through to see my margin notes, I'll always see them in the context of the surrounding text. By contrast, digital annotation listings usually display only the text I highlighted, removed from context.
— https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1202663208059691009
[@@bs...]
are Bucklescript annotations for FFINotice the vecT
annotation, this allows compiler to be sure that returned value is { x: float, y: float }
.
I was also keeping separate folder of notes, initially using Notational Velocity, which then changed to just a folder of markdown files. Some of the notes were related to projects, some of them not. I never knew if a given piece of information should go in my TaskPaper comments, or my other notes. And then, there were notes for thinking about things, which sometimes spawned new projects. This was a disaster in slow-motion.