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had an eye popping chance to visit @dynamicland1 where @cabbibo and @lukexi spent several hours enthusiastically showing off the space. obvs I'm a big fan of @worrydream's work & various talks, but what I wasnt prepared for was that I'm still thinking about it now! THREAD 1/n
I'm not gonna explain the core premise of @Dynamicland1 , so these tweets are just a couple of things I cant get out of my head at 4am - so if you dont know it, go read about it! back? cool. assuming you have a vague idea of what dynamicland is, as I did, before walking in...
2 (billion) things really stuck with me - besides how well the model of 'physical cards of code in space' actually works, and the admirable fact its largely self hosted, with the kernel sitting on bits of paper stuck to a large whiteboard in the corner -
1) how many choices it makes that are inverted from the usual coding paradigms.. eg encapsulation? pfa they want the opposite. it works by making statements about objects, then some kind of prolog like inference engine constantly tries to converge to a truth.
its the *opposite* of encapsulation; it's "the default" to make sweeping, often breaking state changes globally with a simple statement. forget encapsulation and data hiding, if I want to draw circles on any object in the world, I just declare thats what I want to do that.
insanely dynamic (the clue was in the name, I guess...). it feels like such a different model; I was expecting a kind of 'physical data flow' paradigm - and they can do that - but the 'spooky action at a distance' they have going on is way more surprising and inspiring.
(also they really do mean dynamic. if you occlude one of the cameras or flip *any* sheet of code, that code ceases to run. including bits of the kernel. the state & code is all in the physical world, 99.9%, all the time. bonkers! I love it!)
then 2), how endless were the imaginative compositions of the ideas. the guys spent several hours showing 'silly' examples of physical interactions - driving raspberry-pi-brained bots with pieces of a music sequencer precariously balanced on top, pulling notes from the layout...
oh and now what about a wireless usb keyboard you plonk down next to a card to edit it - to binders of didactic and playful stuff you just leaf thru. I kept having 'penny drop' moments at a rate Im really not used to. it was just so playful. at times, yeah it felt a bit 'cutesy',
or maybe glib, but then once the dropped penny festered in my brain a bit, it would drop again and sort of go 'yeah but woah that 'silly' idea is actually pretty cool and composable'.
I came away thinking that, yes its every bit as heathrobinson as it looks, and they have a billion things to do - but along the way the choices theyve made about the semantics of how it all inter-operates and how tactile it is really had me shook.
it feels like they're onto something, that felt so gloriously 'californian from the 60s' and so *refreshingly* different from the sort of world of computation I normally inhabit. ok I think I've channeled my inner seth abramson long enough. it's cool, man!
(oh I meant @marcoshealey there. sorry whoever 'marcos' is)
