He keeps talking about them because they're important visions that society badly needs. The vision behind the Dynabook, that of a true personal dynamic medium, has still not been realized.
The "Getting Started" page of the documentation seems to be a better introduction to the project than the home page. It has a tutorial with screenshots and code snippets, and is overall a better description of what the language does:
I've been there before. After getting burnt out on my startup, I spent about half a year traveling and trying out other hobbies not doing any coding at all.
When I got back to it I felt a little bit lost as to what to do, but doing these things helped me get back into the habit:
- Find a good project-oriented book and just follow along. In my case this was "Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles", but according to your interests and skill-levels there's plenty of good project-oriented books out there. I think this is good to do in parallel with your own side projects, because it gives you structure that the writers gave some pedagogical thought towards, and will thus help you gain confidence by solving problems and building something substantial over several weeks or months. This confidence will then put you in a better headspace for your self-directed work.
Don't engage in the online tutorials, where the author maybe wrote in a couple hours over a weekend. Instead, find well-respected books and courses that the authors poured serious effort into and that people consistently cite as having been influential to them.
- Read and engage with activities besides programming. I think one problem beginning programmers have is that they get so obsessed with just consuming programming related content. While the concentrated education you'll get out of this is great, from my experience reading about programming and tech doesn't lead to interesting ideas about things to make. What I think does lead to interesting ideas is cultivating curiosity about the world, and feeding it through reading and exploring.
- Study good software. In most creative disciplines there's a huge emphasis on studying the works of the masters of the art. This is so students can 1) understand the discipline's history and 2) develop good taste. The creation of software, whether you view it from a coding angle or from a UI angle, is mostly a design discipline. So taste matters a lot. I recommend studying the history of computing and finding good old artifacts to study(history is good because the excitement the pioneers felt might rub off on you, and help you see the field from a fresh perspective). Any software that you personally enjoy using is worth studying like this, but I think paying attention to the classics helps too.
- Learn how to design. This might seem like a distraction, but improving your design skills even just a bit can really help with making your ideas more engaging. The design community also has a lot of practices and advice on how to come up with good ideas that are worth seeking out.
- Find creators whose work you enjoy, follow them, and study their work. The most creative and prolific people I know all have one or more creators who were massive inspirations for them, and that they obsessed over and often spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to emulate. Too much focus on the copying part can be a hindrance in the short term, but being sensitive to these chains of inspiration, and seeking out who inspired the people who inspired you, can lead you down interesting paths. Find networks of creatives locally, on Twitter, slack groups, wherever, and engage with them, and contextualize your work in their framework(whether it's startups, art, or anything).
- Read up on creativity! IMO while self-help and pop-psychology books/ can be counterproductive if you spend too much time in them, in small doses they can be useful for analyzing your habits and practices. I recommend reading visakanv's threads about these topics: https://www.notion.so/a-list-of-visakanv-s-threads-1a6ed25cf...
Yes, this siloing stops me from using annotation features "native" to each app and format as such as well.
Instead, I prefer to exfiltrate information from the silos(apps, formats, etc) and put them into my note taking system. Then I can do highlights, annotations, etc. on my own terms and also get the benefits of centralization such as searching and linking(the OP has another post describing their own system, which is pretty cool[1]). Currently I'm using Notion, which is also a silo of its own, but it's one that gives me a lot of control over how I lay my information out(and an escape plan from).
There are a lot of perspectives on this issue with data silos and walled gardens. But I'm of the opinion that it's a fairly bad state for all of us "end users". Computers to me are about infinite flexibility and malleability, but ironically the tools we have for annotation and remixing are in practice worse than what we have in the physical world. Reading a book in the physical world, I can converse with the author simply by jotting marginalia with my pencil. It's fluid, intuitive, and the medium of paper encourages it(in fact it can't help but be mutated by my use!: pages get bended, stained, torn, etc.). If I want to go further I can add post-it notes to mark interesting passages, I can xerox some pages and create subsections, if it's a magazine I can just tear them all out! That kind of flexibility just isn't available on a computer.
I think it's worth thinking really hard why we're in this state, especially since computing pioneers were actually very optimistic that data and computing would be way more personally malleable than it is now(I've been working on a small comic on this theme myself[2]). For example, check out this short demo[3] of Smalltalk where Alan Kay hooks up a single frame from an animation of a bouncing ball to a painting program, to modify that one frame while also monitoring the loop. Smarter than paper, but way more flexible.
My own thinking lately has been that developers need to think more about how their apps, like your PDF viewer, could cooperate with other apps to achieve our goals. All sorts of deep questions spring forth from here: "what is the best inter-communication system for them to cooperate with?", "how do you design them to intuitive?", "how can you make the UX as good as 'packaged apps'?". And looking at the history of personal computing, these are fairly old questions. The Unix Philosophy provides us with some clues, and its success, even in the smaller world of developer-oriented computing, gives us some hope.
Personally, I'm excited to one day live in a world where my desktop and smartphone and other devices -my computing spaces- feel less like a collection of walled gardens that refuse to intermingle, and more like one big beautiful garden, an ecosystem: lots of small, useful programs, chatting and cooperating, data freely flowing between them, each new program multiplying their collective potential and creating a new ecology, that I can adapt to my psyche and my needs, helping me be a better human.
Hey, author here!
That's exciting, you basically mirror my thoughts here :)
I agree with what you're saying about siloes, that's especially sad considering that having all this stuff unified and interacting is not some sort of mad science fiction, it's totally possible with technology that we have. It's just tedious for various reasons (one of which is that demand from users isn't high in the first place).
I'm working on a browser extension that unifies annotations and highlights from different sources like pocket, instapaper, hypothesis, or even plaintext notes: https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia . I've been using it for more than a year, hope to release it soon (few things are specific to my setup, so I need to make them simpler/clearer for other people to use).
I'm not familiar enough with any of those systems to definitively say if that demo could be reproduced in them(though I'm very interested in getting acquainted with them). My impression is that all of those environments are quite powerful in different ways though.
If you can find the right set of people, twitter's "people you follow" filter can be a great way to search for things, for similar reasons to those you bring up.
yeah and then your feed gets bombarded by whatever political leaning that person has coz twitter has no way to "follow" someone without seeing retweets/likes
Yes, there is value in memorizing things, as things in our memory are easier to work with for thinking than things we have to go out, search for, access, and then get into our memory. See for example Barbara Oakley's discussion on mathematical fluency:
Or Feynman on the need for mathematical fluency to do physics:
> What we have to do is to learn to differentiate like we know how much is 3 and 5, or how much is 5 times 7, because that kind of work is involved so often that it’s good not to be confounded by it. When you write something down, you should be able to immediately differentiate it without even thinking about it, and without making any mistakes. You’ll find you need to do this operation all the time—not only in physics, but in all the sciences. Therefore differentiation is like the arithmetic you had to learn before you could learn algebra.
> Incidentally, the same goes for algebra: there’s a lot of algebra. We are assuming that you can do algebra in your sleep, upside down, without making a mistake. We know it isn’t true, so you should also practice algebra: write yourself a lot of expressions, practice them, and don’t make any errors.
Of course, in this particular discussion re: javascript, I think the design of the language doesn't help much here. Consider Javascript's `Date`, which the OP calls out as an API with a particularly difficult to remember set of conventions. Authors of languages and libraries can remedy this by having a coherence in design, naming, and behavior that help people build mental structures to memorize how these work and achieve the kind of fluency they need to do things without googling. Ruby's standard library I think is particularly good at this(here "principle of least surprise" helps not just with discovery, but retention).
EDIT: also want to add that using documentation and external resources is totally valid, as the grandparent comment states. There's just a balance to be had between relying on Google versus what you can draw from your mind quickly. Also think it's worthwhile to note that there is interesting work to be done in making documentation systems better and more integrated into our runtimes, see for example: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/margin-notes/
They are. If you make a react native project using the official boilerplate generator, the resulting project will be able to run on both Android and iOS out of the box, with no modifications. It's true that you might need to use native APIs and components for specific features, but the everyday UI building blocks of RN are cross platform. These are(in my mind): the flexbox layout engine, styleable box/image/text components, animation system, and a touch and gesture interaction system. In addition many of the other parts are cross platform too: geolocation, device dimensions, activity indicators, alerts etc.
Even some of the built-in components are platform specific though, such as the segmented control for iOS and view pager for Android. But the nice thing is you don't need to create a separate project to use these, you can just chose the appropriate one at runtime based on the platform.
Bodybuilding is a great example of a discipline that's become much more efficient at turning pain into gain than it used to be. Having to put in effort is fine, but it should be the right kind of effort.
Indeed, that's a nice way to frame my thesis. Or maybe even more directly: what if books were shaped such that "reading a book" meant "doing SQ3R to a book"?
https://github.com/revery-ui/revery