I wouldn't dare to claim Victor for my cause, and I'm only reflecting on what he said in his learnable programming essay.

> It seems that for him, discussing improving programming tools was a diversion from his long term aims of uncovering a new way of thinking with computers. His disassociation from live coding seems to be a direct criticism of Khan Academy's approach but maybe he has a more general criticism of live coding...

I don't think this is indicated in his essay. i.e.

> Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill. Learning about "for" loops is not learning to program, any more than learning about pencils is learning to draw. ... Thus, the goals of a programming system should be: (1) to support and encourage powerful ways of thinking; (2) to enable programmers to see and understand the execution of their programs

He very much is concerned with programming not as a new way of thinking, but as an existing way of thinking. The examples in his essays then go on to elaborate on programming with better tools to understand execution; it is not a re-invention in any sense. We could try to interpret this passage:

> We change programming. We turn it into something that's understandable by people.

I think this means: we make programming into something that's understandable by people. Comprehensible. Is it change, or is it augmentation? His words imply the former, but his actions (features) imply the latter. Finally we get to:

> Likewise, a well-designed system is not simply a bag of features. A good system is designed to encourage particular ways of thinking, with all features carefully and cohesively designed around that purpose. This essay will present many features! The trick is to see through them -- to see the underlying design principles that they represent, and understand how these principles enable the programmer to think.

Yep, it is about design. He is just scratching the surface of a field I refer to as PXD (programmer experience design) :). The essay then goes onto to present design principles useful in helping make programming more understandable, and examples of those principles at work through various demoed features. Some of those features include some form of liveness; but many don't.

Yes his learnable programming is about improving existing programming tools, but he treats that as a diversion, his other stuff seems quite different.

His recent talk calls for a break from established norms and a return to the free thinking of the early days of computer science. His work combining geometry with syntax (which is also an interest of mine) follows on from that early work, it's as though he's treating the last few decades of software engineering as a diversion.

To me it's quite clear that Victor is calling for something more akin to augmenting and extending human thought, maybe your 'cybernetic melding'. He argues that this software will be used in ways which we cannot yet understand -- he thinks it'll be future generations who develop use and understanding for such technology, he's just chipping away at the possibilities.

But maybe your more approach is more optimistic in this regard, in that you're finding ways that could improve programmers' lives now.

I think my approach is optimistic too, in developing technology through use, taking communities of practice as a starting point, not an end goal.

> He argues that this software will be used in ways which we cannot yet understand

I feel the same way.

> But maybe your more approach is more optimistic in this regard, in that you're finding ways that could improve programmers' lives now.

I'm actually pessimistic that we have much time to innovate. I see programming as a viable profession only for at most another 20 years; by then speech dialogue based systems (aka AIs) are advanced enough to take over on what were programming these tasks before.

I don't see a need for pessimism there. If speech is text plus prosody, then I see adding a prosodic channel to the programming interface as augmenting/enriching programming languages, not replacing them. I also don't think speech is 'special' in terms of intelligence (e.g. Deaf people are just as intelligent), so enriching text could just as easily come in a different form of imagery (prosody being a form of mental imagery) such as drawing. And that is the area that Victor is working in.