Andy Matuschak: evaluation

Transcript context

…On the point about more programming books. Ironically, the reason why there's some more resources on programming is that it's just so legible, but it already makes it easier to understand in the first place. You just have this reinforcement. Nand to Tetris is like a video game analog to learning, maybe not just programming, but how things in the internals of a computer work but programming has an element where it already feels like a video game. I have a friend who has a sort of intense sort of manic energy, and he used to be addicted to video games when he was a teenager, and now he just stays up all night in these coding binges. It's just the same part of the brain. Are you optimistic about things like video games and fiction being able to work and feel as though they're not already kind of like a video game, like programming? I think what makes programming feel like a video game is this sense of instantaneousness, this sense of direct contact with the environment. You're learning about a conceptual world, but that world is right underneath your hands, and as you manipulate it, you're constantly getting this feedback, the red squiggly lines, you’re pressing command R regularly, and you're seeing it fail, and that feels great. There's this feeling that's very common for programmers, and it's laden with doom. The feeling is it's like 9 p.m., and you've been working on a thing all day, and it's almost working. It's almost working. And you know, if you just debug this one thing, then your project will be done, and you'll be able to go to, so you're like, “Well, I'll just stay up and I'll debug this one last thing.” And then you start debugging it, and you get it, and you solve it, and that feels great then immediately you run into one more thing, like, “Oh, it's almost running all the way through, it's almost going end to end,” and you're like, “Well, I'll just stay up a little bit longer.” Before you know it, it's 2 a.m. You keep going because it feels so good. You feel the sense of forward progress. You're not just staring at a wall. For the programming problems where you are at a brick wall, it doesn't feel like this. It feels bad. Can every field be transformed into something where you can feel the sense of forward progress? You can get this rapid feedback cycle. I think that's really hard. It's not clear to me that some fields can be transformed in that way. I think we can get a lot closer in most cases than we're at right now. What's hard about designing a user interface is that often there's this feeling of exploring a combinatorial search space. Programming often feels like a search problem too. You have a sense that there's some right way to solve the problem. There might be some set of right ways to solve the problem, and you're looking for it. And you have some heuristics that guide you to, like, “Oh, this might be a dynamic programming problem!”, or this might be something that is solved well by separating concerns or something like that. Design often feels less like that. You have those heuristics, too. You have those patterns, too. Often it just feels like, “Nope, I just need to try 300 things.” The core action of Figma is to duplicate. You have an artboard, you tried something, and that didn't work so you select it, and you press Command D. And what you end up with, and when you look at Design Twitter, it's just all these screenshots of people's Figmas with a million artboards. They're just trying stuff. And you don't have this feeling, or at least I don't, and I think many designers don't have this feeling of progress. You're just kind of exploring parts of the search space, and you're learning that parts of the search space don't work. And eventually you stumble on one that does, but you don't have this feeling of getting closer often. xploring parts of the search space, and you're learning that parts of the search space don't work. And eventually you stumble on one that does, but you don't have this feeling of getting closer often. Often there will be like weeks that go by without feeling like you're getting closer, because what you're doing is just kind of like narrowing the search space.…

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