An interesting talk indeed. Thank you for sharing.

Though the end result of his circuit demonstration was - at least for me
- a bit confusing. I don't know about others, but when thinking about circuits I like to see the cables. His ideas regarding the current and voltage displays are nice and intuitive, but don't take away my cables! ;)

Regards,
Sven

Agreed, very interesting (although I had to skip the last few minutes due to other things happening). From a purely mechanical point of view I'd be interested to know whether the coding examples were fully-implemented, or if he was in effect miming to a prepared video.

Somebody else has mentioned incremental compilation: a number of years ago there was something called Mystic Pascal that tried this, although I never used it (I was in the throes of Modula-2 at the time) and it ended up as a freebie on a cover disc. I've always felt that there might still be something in it worth looking at...

To my surprise, I've managed to find a copy of this at http://www.g7jjf.com/512/512-20.zip , I thought it had vanished completely.

I've not attempted to fire it up, but it appears to be aligned with TP1, except that it is distinguished by the ability to evaluate expressions immediately including where these are procedure calls with (simple?) parameters. The IDE (such as they were in those days) also has a timer/multitasking facility, onto which user-written procedures can be hooked.

There might be limited capability for tweaking an executing procedure on-the-fly by changing global variables, but obviously nothing as sophisticated as what Bret Victor was proposing in that video.

I also found
http://www.megalextoria.com/usenet-archive/news050f1/b70/comp/lang/pascal/00000039.html which suggests that Mystic Pascal failed to take off because the author took orders for either it or a related product (JRT Pascal?) before it was in a position to be shipped.

We were certainly aware of it and had it in our price list in the late 80s, and that implies that we actually had or were confident that we could get stock. But I don't think we ever sold any, and it ended up being shipped as shareware not long after.