Viewpoint demo — Scott Kim's PhD project, Stanford University 1988

Well put! Text is graphics, but technology has historically limited how it looks and what you can do with it. The idea of text with control characters like "carriage return" and "newline", fixed width text, limited length lines, and text editors that wrap words when the cursor gets to the edge of the screen, and terminals with multiple lines that scroll, all incrementally evolved out of emulating punched card machines. And now we emulate VT100s emulating punched card machines. But it doesn't have to be that way. Here's a great piece of exploratory research that imagines how things could be different, by an amazing visionary visual thinker and artist, Scott Kim: "Viewpoint" is part of Scott Kim's PhD dissertation that he did at Stanford in 1988 (with Donald Knuth as principle advisor). It was programmed in Cedar, and ran on a color Dorado workstation at Xerox PARC. ▶ this video >Demo and explanation of Viewpoint, a computer system that imagines how computers might be different had they been designed by visual thinkers instead of mathematicians. Caution: this is basic research, not a proposal for a practical piece of software. Part of my PhD Dissertation at Stanford University in 1988. At 12:22, he starts with a blank screen, and performs a "visual boot", to use Viewpoint to build itself. link link link This is a visualraccoon Perspective on Scott Kim‘s very graphic and revolutionary exploration, Viewpoint: Toward a Computer for Visual Thinker. What would it be like to go back to visual first principles and take a fresh look at graphic user interfaces? The Viewpoint Thesis is that a small number of pixel manipulation primitives can be defined such that if they are bound to keyboard and mouse actions it is then possible to build a simple text-graphic editor by drawing it, and that that editor can be used to draw-build itself.* The Viewpoint Thesis & Editor is part of a larger project founded on the hypothesis that: “Only by treating the screen itself as a first class citizen will we be able to build computers that are truly for visual thinkers.” Scott, 1987. This project includes building visual programming languages for such thinkers. Viewpoint: Toward a Computer for Visual Thinkers link link When I started my PhD project in 1981, the IBM PC was brand new, and it would be years before the Mac and Microsoft Windows would appear. Nonetheless I was familiar with graphical user interfaces because of my internship at nearby Xerox PARC, the visionary research center that spawned, among other things, the laser printer and the bitmapped display. I was well-acquainted with Alan Kay's vision of a dynabook (he envisioned the notebook computer in 1975), and understood the power of graphic user interfaces and graphic tools like paint programs to bring the power of computers to artists and visual thinkers. At the time I was part of the digital typography program within the Stanford computer science department, which built computer programs for digital typeface designers. I was also enthralled by the Visual Thinking course at Stanford, which taught engineers in the product design program how to think visually. It struck me as odd, and deeply wrong, that we were building tools for visual artists in a programming language that was utterly symbolic, and lacking in visual sophistication. I yearned for a programming language that had the same visual clarity that graphic user interfaces had. So I set about wondering what a visual programming language might look like. If computers had been invented by artists and visually oriented people, instead of by mathematicians and engineers, how might they write programs? It seemed to me an impo

TodePond is such an inspired and inspirational genius! Screens in Screens is exactly the one I was going to recommend too, that will recursively suck you into watching all the rest. Screens in Screens (ScreenPond) source code: link TodePond's videos: link Including the latest stuff on Patreon: link ...Where I heard about her recent talk about CellPond at ACM SIGPLAN in Lisbon: link It's a modern ground-up reimagination of visual computing, as foundational as Scott Kim's 1988 PhD dissertation, "Viewpoint", but deeper: ▶ this video >Demo and explanation of Viewpoint, a computer system that imagines how computers might be different had they been designed by visual thinkers instead of mathematicians. Caution: this is basic research, not a proposal for a practical piece of software. Part of my PhD Dissertation at Stanford University in 1988. Toward a computer for Visual Thinkers: link Todepond talked about how she was introduced to visual programming as a child by Stagecast Creator (aka KidSim aka Cocoa): link >Stagecast Creator is a visual programming language intended for use in teaching programming to children. It is based on the programming by demonstration concept, where rules are created by giving examples of what actions should take place in a given situation. It can be used to construct simulations, animations and games, which run under Java on any suitable platform.[1] >History >The software known as Creator originally started as a project by Allen Cypher and David Canfield Smith in Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG) known as KidSim. It was intended to allow kids to construct their own simulations, reducing the programming task to something that anyone could handle. Programming in Creator uses graphical rewrite rules augmented with non-graphical tests and actions. >In 1994, Kurt Schmucker became the project manager, and under him, the project was renamed Cocoa, and expanded to include a Netscape plug-in. It was also repositioned as "Internet Authoring for Kids", as the Internet was becoming increasingly accessible. The project was officially announced on May 13, 1996. [...] link >That's something that Alexander Repenning's "AgentSheets" supported (among other stuff): you could define cellular automata rules by before-and-after examples, wildcards and variables, and attach additional conditions and actions with a visual programming language. >AgentSheets and other cool systems are described in this classic paper: “A Taxonomy of Simulation Software: A work in progress” from Learning Technology Review by Kurt Schmucker at Apple. It covered many of my favorite systems. link >Chaim Gingold wrote a comprehensive "Gadget Background Survey" at HARC, which includes AgentSheets, Alan Kay's favorites: Rockey’s Boots and Robot Odyssey, and Chaim's amazing SimCity Reverse Diagrams and lots of great stuff I’d never seen before: link)%20Gadget%20(1)%20Survey.pdf >Chaim Gingold has analyzed the SimCity (classic) code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams": [...] link >Another great visual programming language for kids that supported defining cellular automata rules by example and visual programming: >KidSim (later Cocoa, then Stagecast Creator) Smith, David C., Allen Cypher, and James Spohrer (1994) In KidSim graphical simulations are created via graphical rewrite rules, which also enables a kind of programming by demonstration. The creators argue that most people can use editor GUIs (e.