I once wrote a linear programming optimal solver for a business problem.
But because it was all equations and logical reasoning, it was hard to understand, and boring to non-enthusiasts.
So my manager had me make a visual simulation instead, which we could then present to his managers.
This isn't as stupid as it sounds - we humans have huge visual processing networks. It makes sense to tap into that when interfacing with other humans.
I think to learn programming or math, you actually end up learning to use this visual wiring to think about written symbols. But this process of rewiring - while valuable - is very hard and slow, and only a tiny fraction of humans have gone through it.
partly as a "this is what we were doing in 1962, you are now as far removed from that demo as that demo was removed from the year 1900 -- do you really feel like you've made the analogous/concomitant progress in programming?" ... and one of his points there was that a lot of programming acts as a "pop music" where you are trying to replicate the latest new sounds and marginally iterate on those, rather than study the classics and the greats and the legacy of awesome things that had been done in the past.
I'm just putting this Alan Kay question (from Stack Overflow) here because of relevance.
In that question, he's considered not with implementation or how good the execution of an idea is (which is certainly one type of progress), but in genuinely new ideas.
I don't think I personally am qualified to say yes or no. There are new data structures since then for example, but those tend to be improvements over existing ideas rather than "fundamental new ideas" which I understand him (perhaps wrongly) to be asking for.
this is awfully manual, does autocad have parametric topology tools ?
programs like houdini are more reactive and mathematical (no need to create width/volume by hand and trim intersections by hand), i think mech engineering tools (memory fail here) have options like this
But because it was all equations and logical reasoning, it was hard to understand, and boring to non-enthusiasts.
So my manager had me make a visual simulation instead, which we could then present to his managers.
This isn't as stupid as it sounds - we humans have huge visual processing networks. It makes sense to tap into that when interfacing with other humans.
I think to learn programming or math, you actually end up learning to use this visual wiring to think about written symbols. But this process of rewiring - while valuable - is very hard and slow, and only a tiny fraction of humans have gone through it.