Thoughts/notes collected from various Brett Victor writings:

• http://worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda-v0.19-poster.pdf
• http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.html
• notation can be an empowering way of allowing people to understand and work with complex ideas:
  • multiplication in Roman numerals was only for experts, once notation switched to Hindu-Arabic numerals, everyone could do it
  • before first data visualization (William Playfair 1786) all data was represented as tables
  • Feynman inventing diagrams for subatomic particles (solving things visually)

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.

• so the idea is to use dynamic medium to reinvent representations of thought (imagining, creating, explaining, ...) with dynamic representations
• humans can interact with things on multiple levels:
  • symbolic (math equations, etc.)
  • visual (data visualization, etc.)
  • tangible (touching stuff)
  • spatial (moving in a space)
  • relevant to this is what Alan Kay said in "Doing With Images Makes Symbols" - Einstein used to "feel" math in his hands, and would move around the room when thinking (spatially) - most of mathematicians and physicist do this - use tangible/spatial "modes" for thinking, and symbolic representation for communicating
• programming is currently "blindly manipulating symbols"

  the author sees and manipulates indirect symbolic representations, and must imagine how they give rise to dynamic behavior

  • this could be improved by:
    • seeing the dynamic behaviour that is being created (simulator)
    • seeing multiple representations of that behaviour (ladder of abstraction)
    • directly manipulating representations and data - instead of manipulating symbols
    • these ideas are relevant to future of coding research
• Brett's idea is that the representations we use to communicate with others, are the same we use internally
  • improving the ones used to communicate with others, will improve our thinking
  • there is tension between this and ideas about workshop vs library where the "internal language" is different to the "external" one
• Brett seems to be all about representations as tools for thinking, not about programming

  using representations to think powerfully about systems

  • programming is a specific case of a broader problem, and it probably won't matter in a hundred years
  • we switched from analog to digital circuits, and then to programmable circuits, but they are all about the same thing

  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