Now here’s an hour well spent, Bret Victor giving a talk on “Inventing on Principle”:
He demos some really nice experiments in live interfaces, including some javascript live coding with a nice implementation of time scrubbing. He uses this great work as an illustration for his main point though, which is about why he has done these things. He puts forward a vision of the inventor as someone who isn’t motivated by building a career, making a startup, or engineering challenges in industry or research, but clear moral principles.
Among others he mentions Richard Stallman, which reminded me of the MOTIVATION file that comes with emacs.
Anyway watch it — I’m going to watch it again before commenting further..
He had me when he startet making the animation of the leaves by just changing the number of iterations live. I’ve encountered a lot of interesting stuff while live coding, even if the process isn’t as smooth as he does (i alway have to save the file or execute the code) but specially when learning stuff it is very motivating to find glitches and stuff that wasn’t intended but looks more attractive than the intended result.
It is well known that spontaneity in public performance is something that requires careful preparation.