Add Bret Victor to the list of people to read about when you want to be depressed about your lot in life. This list includes Fabrice Bellard et al.

Bret is even more impressive since he combines hardware, software and UI skills.

Why depressive? As Neal Stephenson mentions upon Hiro meeting Raven in Snow Crash. If you are over age of 25, you realize that there are certain levels of excellence that you will never reach even if you move to that Shaolin monastery.

I think some people have this innate drive to excellence (how much of that is acquired and how much is inherited is another discussion) and apply themselves with full dedication. You can see Bret's teenage projects were already pretty impressive.

Ever since then Bret's toolbox of skills has only multiplied till you see the effect today.

If someone had told me his work had been done by a devoted team of a dozen people, I'd still be tremendously impressed that only twelve people managed to accomplish so much. The fact that it's one man? It's chilling.

Try looking at things another way—he's generously provided us all with an incredible foundation upon which to build our own things. After having read a few of his essays, I certainly feel changed.

I feel exactly the opposite way. I find this essay and his site in general really inspiring, and I always get lots and lots of ideas for things to do when I read them! I'm also really glad he's implemented Tangle, because it means I don't have to; I can just use it. Although I haven't yet.

Exactly - the takeaway is that Bret can create amazing things as a result of building off of his own creations. He's not running, he's building reusable components for a rocket ship.

That's not what I get from it. I think Bret is creating amazing things because he's doing something different from the crowd, he's worked hard on it over a period of many years, his standards of quality are extremely high, and he's spent even more years developing the skills (programming and visual design, in this case) needed to make it work. (And he's pretty smart, too, which is kind of a multiplier to the above items.)

Building off of your own creations and 750¢ will get you a cup of coffee. Build off other people's creations where you can. If you're doing something different from the crowd, sooner or later you'll get to a point where you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you have to be able to do that or you'll hit a wall. But it's far from sufficient.

"he's worked hard on it over a period of many years, his standards of quality are extremely high, and he's spent even more years developing the skills" - completely agree with that too. However, just view this as pre-requisites to building work that is so good that no other building block will suffice. Tangle would not have evolved if not building off Magic Ink and other work. This article would not have been nearly as meaningful without Tangle and the other visualization patterns he created in past.

Ok well, it's been 3 hours I'm on the website; reading, looking the source, bookmarking lots of things, buying new games and books. This guy is simply amazing. Please, do yourself a favor and get a look at these links: http://worrydream.com/#!/Links

this is exactly how I feel after spending the last 60 minutes reading through his site.