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But does he ship?


Sometimes not shipping gives us more freedom to explore.


I really wish he did. I think one of the greatest disservices he does himself is not shipping working code for the examples in his presentation. We've seen what and we're intrigued, but ship something that shows how so we can take the idea and run with it.


So, have you seen Media for Thinking the Unthinkable?

http://vimeo.com/67076984

The working code for the Nile viewer presented is on GitHub:

https://github.com/damelang/nile/tree/master/viz/NileViewer


I think the whole point of his series of talks is to inspire others to invent new things that not even he has thought of.


A delay in releasing code would be valuable then. Those too impatient to wait can start hacking on something new now and give lots of thought to this frontier and those that want to explore casually can do so a few months later when the source is released. Releasing nothing is a non-solution. Why make everyone else stumble where you have? That's just inconsiderate.

Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvenimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea.


bingo, this remembers me of people not having time to get bored and then innovate by giving your mind some free space to go around. The typical scenario of the problem solution once you give it a break....


> But does he ship?

Why does that matter?


Fooling around with a paint brush in your study is fine, but real artist ship.

A bunch of ideas that sound great in theory are just that, it is only by surviving the crucible of the real world that ideas are validated and truly tested. When Guy Steele and James Gosling were the only software developers in the world who could program in Java, every Java program was a masterpiece. It is only once the tool was placed in the hands of mere mortals that its flaws were truly known.


Sometimes the journey is the product.

Walk around a good gallery. There are a pretty good number of pieces entitled "Study #3", or something of that sort. An artist is playing around with a tool, or a technique, trying to figure out something new.

Piano music is probably where this concept gets the most attention. Many études, such as those by Chopin, are among the most significant musical works of the era.


Yes, sometimes.

In another talk Bret claims that you basically cannot do visual art/design without immediate feedback. I was wondering how he thought people that create metal sculptures via welding, or carve marble, possibly work. It's just trivially wrong to assert you need that immediate feeback, and calls all of the reasoning into question.


Good point. I think programmers would be better off dropping the artistic pretensions altogether and accepting that they are much closer to engineers and architects in their construction of digital sandcastles.


and some artists create amazing art coding it in Processing; just take a look at Casey Reas's works.

also Beethoven wrote down his complex music quite often w/o using the instrument as he heard it in his mind...


You're forgetting about the hundred even thousands of painting they did that are not in the gallery. These paintings are the same as "shipping" even though you never see them in the gallery.

You can't play around with a tool or technique without actually producing something. You can talk about how a 47.3% incline on the brush gives the optimal result all day long, but it's the artist that actually paints that matters.


> Fooling around with a paint brush in your study is fine, but real artist ship.

Van Gogh didn't ship.


> Why does that matter?

Because I want to play with his Drawing Dynamic Viz demo. http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend...


He probably doesn't. He stays too much time not doing the machine work :)

The fact that you point "shipping" as a part of this discussion just shows how much he's right.


he is not allowed to talk about his ipad / Apple stuff. did TBL ship the W3C? protocols are the perfect example of shipping by design.




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