Although I find Bret's talks inspirational as well, I see obvious limitations to his approach of direct feedback everywhere. Namely, our art hasn't always been made in this fashion - that's an easily disproven statement. Textiles, architecture, and, indeed, most live performance have grown planning-intensive aspects.<p>In the same way that he considers it dangerous to rely on code or other "action at a distance" mechanisms for art, I consider it dangerous to believe that immediacy is the most worthwhile pursuit. It expands the playful space of thought, but that's not the only space we can work from. Deductive frameworks, for example, aren't playful at all.
The tools that Bret talks about are insanely awesome and innovative. However, I don't think they are the holy grail of development. I think they will have a significant impact in a few specific fields, but will not apply to overall design and development as well. Thanks to dom for bringing this to my attention.
I'll add a chorus to the voice of those who have been inspired by Brett. I'm a musician, and his ideas have led me to explore live improvisation in a 'duet' with the computer, where I can allow the computer to improvise, or guide it as I choose.<p>I'm planning to create an interactive album based on this concept, where the listener can explore a 'sound world' at their own pace through gestures.
Bret has been a huge inspiration for my work and life.<p>I think the main takeaway message from the last two talks is to show how by creating tools, one can enable working in fundamentally different ways, and the creation of fundamentally different things that wouldn't have been practical to create otherwise.
These talks are amazing and his app looks fantastic. While it's easy to be creative in code, it's still easy to lose a huge amount of what we were aiming for while coding. It's exciting to see someone like Bret Victor working on problems like this so explicitly.
Didn't remember who he was until I saw the "Inventing on Principle" cover slide - that talk and what he was doing in it blew my mind. It just felt like some kind of breakthrough about how to think about and do things with tools that now make these crazy and useful things possible... with (it seems) lots of cool applications for more efficient and satisfying education/learning.