Who writes this

4-loop is written and built by Pablo Flores. One person, working on it alone.

There is no company behind it. Nothing here is sold, there is no account to make, nothing anybody draws leaves their own browser, and there is no arrangement with a third party that any of it feeds into. What the site collects says the same thing in the detail a privacy page owes you.

The name is not a coincidence

The ideas this site is built on are Fernando Flores's — the conversation for action, conditions of satisfaction, the network of commitments — set out in his 1982 dissertation and in Understanding Computers and Cognition, written with Terry Winograd in 1986.

He is my father, and I have been a student and a collaborator of his. Saying so up front seems better than leaving a reader to work it out from a surname, or to wonder whether the site is quietly borrowing one.

None of which makes this site his. It is not approved by Fernando Flores, by Terry Winograd, or by any organisation associated with either, and having worked alongside somebody is not the same as speaking for them. This is one reading of the work. Where it is wrong the mistakes are mine, and I would rather hear about them than not.

Why it exists

My career has been in software development, which is the other half of it. Spend long enough building systems and you notice that they are all very good at recording what happened to a record, and have nothing to say about who asked whom for what — which is what the teaching is about, and what actually breaks.

This is an attempt to make that difference visible rather than argue for it: draw the promises, run them, and see what the design asks of the people in it. Reading about a distinction and watching it move are not the same, and the second is what the editor is for.

Saying something back

The address is hello@4-loop.com, and it reaches me rather than a queue. Corrections to the writing are especially welcome — several pages make claims about a forty-year-old tradition, and getting those wrong in public is worth fixing quickly.