Super sad to see this. I worked with Matt around 2004.
Super smart kid, very nice to work with. I ended up supporting one of the systems he built (in Perl). I used his Cataylst Perl framework for some projects after that because of him.
Well, there’s a parallel universe! Beige boxes running BeOS late-90s-cool maybe, but would we still have had the same upending results for mobile phones, industrial design, world integration, streaming media services…
Bret Victors current project is Dynamicland, a real space he’s been building to explore computing within the physical world, with humans at its center. The system he invented is known as Realtalk, and is integrated into the building, where cameras and projectors engage with the humans within it.
(Procrastination, Red Dwarf reference)