Pygmalion: A Creative Programming Environment |
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abstract Alan Kay analogical argument icon Arnheim attribute call return repeat change delete copy Chapter code list concepts concrete container copy refresh show cr disp create change delete creative dashes dashes data structures delete copy refresh display screen doit draw text break drawline dynamic evaluated example execution false fetch FORTRAN Fregean geticon mousex mousey Gombrich graphical icon icon icon's iconic function iconic structure icons create change interactive Koestler Lucien Freud machine machine language medium menu icons create menu operation microcode mousex mousey index name value shape programming languages PYGMALION recursion refresh show name remember constant remember mode repeat done eval representation Section semantics sequence shape body opcodes short term memory show name value SIMULA Smalltalk subclass subroutine superclass supervector symbols text editors thinking topbutton Unimate value icon value shape body variables vector visual visual thinking waitmouse wdht Xerox PARC
Popular passages
Page 9 - The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily
Page 52 - Among the great numbers of combinations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility ; but just for that reason they are also without effect upon the esthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them ; only certain ones are harmonious, and consequently, at once useful and beautiful.
Page 9 - Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.
Page 9 - Purely verbal thinking is the prototype of thoughtless thinking, the automatic recourse to connections retrieved from storage. It is useful but sterile.
Page 86 - Faraday's contemporaries, appeared either vague or obscure ; and it is in the highest degree astonishing to see what a large number of general theorems, the methodical deduction of which requires the highest powers of mathematical analysis, he found by a kind of intuition, with the security of instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula.
Page 9 - But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought— before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
Page 52 - This is only a hypothesis, and yet here is an observation which may confirm it: when a sudden illumination seizes upon the mind of the mathematician, it usually happens that it does not deceive him, but it also sometimes happens, as I have said, that it does not stand the test of verification ; well, we almost always notice that this false idea, had it been true, would have gratified our natural feeling for mathematical elegance.
Page 40 - We may proceed to define the creative thinking process as the forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specified requirements or are in some way useful.
Page ii - I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Page 35 - Abstract ideas are not so obvious or easy to children or the yet unexercised mind as particular ones. If they seem so to grown men it is only because by constant and familiar use they are made so. For, when we nicely reflect upon them, we shall find that general ideas are fictions and contrivances of the mind, that carry difficulty with them, and do not so easily offer themselves as we are apt to imagine. For example, does it not require some pains and skill to form the general idea of a triangle...