I rewatched Bret Victor’s 2013 talk The Future of Programming (from 1973).

Victor frames the talk as a presentation in 1973 discussing all the different approaches to computing that were being explored at the time and the kinds of tools and languages that came out of them, almost all abandoned or left as curiosities: concepts like spatial representations, constraint-based systems, concurrent programming models, and direct manipulation and software like Smalltalk, Sketchpad and Planner.

It’s interesting to consider all the paths that computing didn’t go down - possibly for good reasons. But what did we lose along the path? What are we re-discovering now?