I find myself rereading the Magic Ink paper today. Vintage Bret Victor from before all the famous talks. http://worrydream.com/MagicInk (2006) When I reread it now, the most valuable lesson for me is the meta-lesson about just the amount of effort it takes to make a memorable argument. The motivation for this paper was:

Before I release v1.0 of the BART widget, I’d like to write a little paper about its design…

—Bret Victor (2005)

People have been writing blog posts for 20 years about how they built something, or how they would redesign the American Airlines website or whatever. Here that's an interlude. This paper packs more effort into a single picture, more puns into a single example, than most whole papers. I'm no longer young, and yet the effort shock is immense.

No longer young! This has become the montage .