I was there before it was fully done. As a person with a strong interest in UX I found it quite exciting.
It definitely tries to be a modern Xerox Park or something like that, and it does really feel like it’s doing a lot of really interesting things in the UI space. I have a really hard time telling whether any of the UI ideas they are experimenting with will actually turn out to be useful and widely adopted, but it definitely helped me think about UX in a better way.
It does seem to me like the kind of thing that would allow capitalizing strongly on something like a shared technical understanding. But that would be very difficult to pull off, because the overlap of people with shared technical understanding and advanced UI understanding is small.
If I were to say something like “DynamicLand can add UX to any layer of abstraction,” how would that sound?
I have been! I thought it was an interesting experiment, and I really hope they have another community day so I can visit again. I think there’s probably a lot to learn from it, and I think there are things that you can only learn effectively by trying out weird experiments in real life to see “how this feels”. But I don’t really expect anything to directly come of it—the project is pretty janky, and while it’s a fantastic platform for tiny cute demos, I don’t think any concrete part of it (other than the general sense of “this is an inspiration to try to go recreate this neat type of interaction in a more robust way”) is really useful.
I haven’t been there, but I was reading about Dynamic Land just yesterday (via Dominic Cummings’ blog), and I’ve read some of Bret Victor’s writings. I approve of the ideas tremendously, but it’s not clear to me that in practice the work has provided any more of an advance in “visual programming” than other efforts in this area. Beyond the decades-old WIMP (ETA: and spreadsheets) interface, none of these, it seems to me, ever make more than toy demos. I have never seen them scale up to real power tools that someone would use to accomplish something. Ideas like these have been around long enough that toys and dreams will no longer do.
There are lathes that can make all of their own parts. Could Dynamic Land create Dynamic Land? What would such a system look like if it could?
I agree that it only makes toy demos, but it definitely goes beyond WIMP. It’s a simulation of the sort of interface one might expect in a future where every surface is a screen—it’s a janky, extremely-low-fidelity simulation, which holds together barely well enough to serve the purpose, but it does serve, and it’s an interesting way to try out this interaction style.
A surprisingly large part of Dynamic Land is actually (in some sense) self-hosting. There is a small core/kernel that is extrinsic, including e.g. the parser for the language. But a lot of low-level functionality is indeed implemented inside the interpreter (as I recall, they use a sort of pseudo-Lua, crossed with Smalltalk-like agent stuff—my vague recollection is that there’s something like a Lua interpreter with a custom preprocessor underlying it.)
Has anyone been to DynamicLand in Berkeley? If so, what did you think of it?
I was there before it was fully done. As a person with a strong interest in UX I found it quite exciting.
It definitely tries to be a modern Xerox Park or something like that, and it does really feel like it’s doing a lot of really interesting things in the UI space. I have a really hard time telling whether any of the UI ideas they are experimenting with will actually turn out to be useful and widely adopted, but it definitely helped me think about UX in a better way.
It does seem to me like the kind of thing that would allow capitalizing strongly on something like a shared technical understanding. But that would be very difficult to pull off, because the overlap of people with shared technical understanding and advanced UI understanding is small.
If I were to say something like “DynamicLand can add UX to any layer of abstraction,” how would that sound?
I have been! I thought it was an interesting experiment, and I really hope they have another community day so I can visit again. I think there’s probably a lot to learn from it, and I think there are things that you can only learn effectively by trying out weird experiments in real life to see “how this feels”. But I don’t really expect anything to directly come of it—the project is pretty janky, and while it’s a fantastic platform for tiny cute demos, I don’t think any concrete part of it (other than the general sense of “this is an inspiration to try to go recreate this neat type of interaction in a more robust way”) is really useful.
I haven’t been there, but I was reading about Dynamic Land just yesterday (via Dominic Cummings’ blog), and I’ve read some of Bret Victor’s writings. I approve of the ideas tremendously, but it’s not clear to me that in practice the work has provided any more of an advance in “visual programming” than other efforts in this area. Beyond the decades-old WIMP (ETA: and spreadsheets) interface, none of these, it seems to me, ever make more than toy demos. I have never seen them scale up to real power tools that someone would use to accomplish something. Ideas like these have been around long enough that toys and dreams will no longer do.
There are lathes that can make all of their own parts. Could Dynamic Land create Dynamic Land? What would such a system look like if it could?
I agree that it only makes toy demos, but it definitely goes beyond WIMP. It’s a simulation of the sort of interface one might expect in a future where every surface is a screen—it’s a janky, extremely-low-fidelity simulation, which holds together barely well enough to serve the purpose, but it does serve, and it’s an interesting way to try out this interaction style.
A surprisingly large part of Dynamic Land is actually (in some sense) self-hosting. There is a small core/kernel that is extrinsic, including e.g. the parser for the language. But a lot of low-level functionality is indeed implemented inside the interpreter (as I recall, they use a sort of pseudo-Lua, crossed with Smalltalk-like agent stuff—my vague recollection is that there’s something like a Lua interpreter with a custom preprocessor underlying it.)